


Pour Me Out Like Water (And Soak Me Up Like Rain)

by commoncomitatus



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, Childhood Trauma, Control Issues, F/F, F/M, Gen, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-26 08:31:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9876647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Five times Zelena just wanted to be loved, and the one time she believed she could be.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [February Challenge](https://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/133275.html) at [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](https://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org).  
> Prompts: Abandonment Issues, Assault, Possession/Mind Control, Lost Childhood (Wild Card).
> 
>  **Warning:** This fic deals with child abuse (emotional cruelty and physical punishment) and the resulting trauma of such. While I try to fade-to-black on actual physical harm it's still not an easy read, so please proceed with caution if this is a subject you struggle with.

***

She wakes in her bed, feeling strange all over.

 _Something’s missing,_ she thinks, but she doesn’t understand what or why, or even how she knows that. She doesn’t understand much of anything, really, only that she’s here and something inside her feels very, very wrong.

Her father is hovering over the bed, staring down at her with a peculiar look on his face. He’s not worried, of course — he never worries, not about her — but he’s frowning in a way she’s never seen before, strange and serious and sober. It’s been a long time since he was all three of those things at once, and the sight of it now, while she’s feeling so disoriented and vulnerable, frightens her. She has a great many reasons to be frightened of him, of course, but this is the first time she’s felt it because she doesn’t know what’s coming.

She opens her mouth to ask what’s going on, but he quiets her before she gets a chance. “Hush, now.”

It’s so strange, the way he says it. He silences her all the time, gritted-out orders like _‘shut up’_ or _‘stupid child’_ , peppered with insults and threats of the switch, but he’s never said it that way before. _“Hush, now_ ,” like she’s actually a real person.

“Father?” she whispers. She doesn’t dare to say anything more.

He says that she’s been ill. He says that she’s had a fever, that it was a bad one. He says that she’s been delirious, raving, half-mad, that she’s been talking in her sleep and making a fool of herself. It doesn’t sound like the truth — wouldn’t she remember if she’d been ill? wouldn’t she remember being delirious or raving or all the rest of it? — but then his nostrils flare and he says that she’s more trouble than she’s worth, and she knows then it must be true because that’s exactly what he’d say if it was.

She blinks up at the ceiling, thinking hard and trying to remember. Something, anything, it doesn’t matter what, just a little piece of why she feels wrong, why she’s shaking. Her head is terribly heavy, her thoughts indistinct; it’s like she’s trying to pierce a fog or a piece of frosted glass. She remembers carrying firewood, remembers tripping and falling, remembers the magic rising like a flood in her chest, her hands, remembers thinking _no-one will see_ , and then…

…and then nothing at all.

Her body is aching a little, but it’s not like the way she feels when she’s been ill. She’s had fevers before, lots of times; she knows the chills and the shivers, the too-hot-too-cold-too-awful feeling, but that’s not what she’s feeling now. No, this is more like the way she feels sometimes after she’s been running around, the way she used to feel back when Mother was still with them and they would play together, weightless and happy and so alive. There’s a strange soreness in her ribs, as well, one that she definitely recognises. It used to hurt exactly like this when she laughed too hard.

She hasn’t laughed in such a very long time, though. Why would she feel it now?

“Get some sleep,” her father says. It’s not a suggestion; just like everything else he says, it’s an order. “I want you up and at ’em tomorrow. All right?”

She nods numbly, still trying to piece her thoughts together. “I’ll try.”

He glares at that, one hand already half-raised. He doesn’t bring it down this time — not now, not like this, not when she’s so helpless — but the warning is there, as deadly as ever. She doesn’t even realise she’s flinching, doesn’t even realise she expects it until until he’s turned away, until the threat dies down and her whole body relaxes. She should know better by now, she supposes; he only ever hurts her when she uses magic, and she can’t very well do that in her present state, can she? No, he’s probably just angry that she used it before, or else he’s upset because she got a fever and he had to go out and fetch his own firewood.

She sneaks out of bed after he leaves, when she hears the door slam shut and she knows that he won’t come back. He’ll be gone for hours, probably, drinking and carousing and doing who knows what. Since Mother died, that’s all he seems to do.

Alone and safe, at least for the time being, she tests her body, circling the room a few times and reacquainting herself with how it feels to move. She feels loose, burdenless, not at all like she does after she’s had an illness. Her head still feels a little wrong, foggy and disconnected, but the rest of her feels lighter than it has in a very long time, like it remembers things the rest of her has forgotten. If she stands perfectly still and squeezes her eyes shut, she can almost catch a shift in the air, the ghost of someone else’s magic shimmering and crackling between her fingers, a flicker of something she can’t quite touch.

_“Your father’s wrong to make you feel badly for being who you are.”_

The words come out of nowhere, echoing like a memory, or the hazy shadow of a dream; they stop her in her tracks, leave her gasping and confused. It’s definitely not her mother’s voice — at least it doesn’t sound anything like the way she remembers her mother’s voice — but there’s a note of something familiar in there, and it makes her think of her. Painfully, she remembers the way it was before, back when Mother was still with them, when Father didn’t drink, when they were a family.

_“Your mother’s not here to protect you any more…”_

He said that before; it’s the last thing she remembers with any kind of clarity. She’d just moved the firewood — no, she made it move on its own — and he was angry, so terribly angry. He was blind with it, seething, the way he always gets when she uses her magic. Her _wickedness_ , he calls it, calls her, and she believes him because Mother is not around any more to tell her it’s not so. His words are the only ones she can hear now, and so they’ve become her only truth.

But she remembers, she’s sure of it now, a voice that wasn’t her mother’s, so close but still so far out of reach. If she keeps her body completely still and doesn’t even breathe, she’s certain she can hear someone else’s mother telling her that she’s not wicked.

_“I wanted to use my magic to help someone for so long.”_

She’s thought it a thousand times, a million times, more times than she’s thought anything else in the whole world, but she’s never let the idea see the light of day. Who would she say it to? Father doesn’t want to hear about her magic; he gets so angry when she talks about it, even sometimes when she’s just thinking about it, and she really doesn’t want to make him angry.

So she keeps it for herself, a secret locked up tight inside her own head. _I don’t want to be wicked, I want to be good, I could do so much good if you’d only let me._ It’s her deepest, most precious secret, and she has never, ever said it out loud.

But then, if she’s never said it, why can she hear the words now, ringing out in her own voice, as loud and clear as anything? Who could she possibly have said it to?

Maybe she really was ill, after all. She can’t really remember anything, but she can hear echoes of things that feel so strange and so real. She must have dreamed them, imagined them in the grip of fever; isn’t that the only explanation? Lonely and sickly and thirsty for comfort, she must have conjured up a vision of her mother or someone just like her. Doesn’t fever make you see things that aren’t really there? Doesn’t it bring to life the secret wishes you’re not allowed to speak?

Thinking about it now, her mind conjures up other strange things too. A house that isn’t hers, a room that’s warm and bright, and a little girl with the happiest smile in the world. Younger than her, but prettier and much cleverer, a girl who still has her mother and a father who loves her and a home that doesn’t let the cold in. A girl she has never met with a name she doesn’t know and a face she can’t make out, who smiles and laughs and calls her _sister_.

Zelena doesn’t have a sister, of course, and she never will. She knew that long before Mother died, but it didn’t matter then as much as it does now. She was loved when Mother was alive, or at least she could recognise love’s colours when she looked in her eyes. Now it’s just her and Father, and he’s so angry and so full of hate; the only colours she knows now are black and blue and green.

If she had a sister, a real one, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so alone all the time, so lost and sad and awful. Maybe she would have someone to talk to, someone who could share her secrets and her wishes, someone who might not see her as wicked. Maybe her father wouldn’t hate her quite so much if he had another daughter too, a good one, a proper one. Maybe everything would be different.

She crawls back into bed, feeling sad and very tired. Why did she have to go and think about those things? Why did she have to go and imagine a sister who loves her and a family who cares about her? Those things aren’t hers and they never will be. It’s not fair that her fever-brain would create them out of nothing, not fair that she has to remember them as if they really happened. It’s not fair that dreams seem more like memories in the cruel light of day. It’s not fair. It’s not _fair_.

They don’t disappear when she goes to sleep. She dreams deeply and vividly, like she always does, and her fever memory-dreams awaken inside her head again like stubborn little bugs that refuse to be banished or burned away.

_…a big room with pretty windows, and sunshine streaming in from all directions…_

_…laughter, small voices lifting higher and higher, joyful and wild._

_“Shh!” and “Not so loud!” and “I’m not even supposed to be out of bed yet!”_

_…a spark of magic, hers but also someone else’s, and a quiet gasp…_

_…elation, pure joy… a moment, just a moment, when all her dreams come true…_

_…then screams of horror and pain… no no no, no no no, please…_

“Don’t send me back there!”

The words are in her throat when she wakes, but even as she reaches for it she finds the dream fading. The feeling is so strong, pain and panic and _don’t send me back please it’s so awful there please please please let me stay_ , but her memories betray her again, the vision vanishing a little further into the fog every time she tries to take it.

She’s confused, frightened, upset, and she’s angry too. It’s the only part of her that is anything like her father, the part that festers and seethes. His temper is a violent, ugly thing but hers is different; she’s too young to do the things he does. She can’t lash out the way he does, can’t raise her fist and make the world bend and shake, and she’s not allowed drown herself in drink. She can only hide the rage inside, tuck it away in a place where it seethes and grows stagnant, rotting away like something sick, like a disease far worse than the fever.

She’s angry because she can’t remember, angry because her head feels wrong, angry because there’s a hole inside her now, a void she never even knew existed. She can’t touch it, can’t even reach for it, but she can feel it, a hollow rattling in her chest like a shard of something shattered, and now that she’s felt it, now she knows it’s in there, she can’t ignore or forget it. She doesn’t understand what it is, but she knows that it hurts.

Well, why not? Everything else does. Why would this be any different?

Lost and lonely, she wonders if this is what it means to be wicked. To have a void inside and not know how to fill it, to know that something is broken and not know how to fix it. She has so much power, but what good is it when it won’t take away the gnawing, endless hurt?

No good at all. Just like the rest of her.

*

In the morning, it’s like nothing ever happened.

Father is the worse for his night out, hands shaking and temper even shorter than usual, so Zelena makes him breakfast and makes him presentable. She’s already used to this, to recognising early when it’s going to be a bad morning, a bad day, a bad night, to reading the signs and the warnings between the words, to keeping her head down and putting her best face on. It’s not much of a life for a girl her age, but maybe it’s the right one for someone as wicked as she is.

He doesn’t thank her. He never does. She keeps her eyes on his hands as they eat breakfast counts out the seconds between the tremors, and doesn’t speak. He doesn’t, either, and she’s very grateful for that. The silence, she’s learned, is a much safer companion than the alternative, the shouting and the violence and the cruel words. He’s content to leave her be today, and after yesterday that’s the best she could have hoped for. After they’ve finished breakfast he’ll send her back out to fetch more wood, and she’ll have learned her lesson and do it the proper way.

She’d better, anyway. He doesn’t say it, but it’s right there in the shaking of his hands, in the stale liquor on his breath and the sharpness behind his eyes. _Mind me, child, or you’ll regret it._

She does. At least, she tries.

It’s cold outside, but still not as treacherous as it is indoors. Gathering firewood the proper way is very tiring, her body clumsy and complaining like it’s still not quite well. Maybe it’s not; she doesn’t really know how long it takes to recover from a fever. Father always sends her back outside as soon as she can stand, and that’s as much as she’s allowed to think about it. It’s a lesson, he tells her, in making the most of things, in looking her best even when she’s feeling her worst. She’ll be thankful, he says, if she knows what’s good for her.

She tries to be. She really does, because the alternative is painful and brutal and it makes her think wicked, unthankful things.

She has to believe there’s more inside her than what he sees. She has to believe that the power burning in her chest, the ache to use it, come from a good place and not a wicked one. She has to believe she’s at least capable of being good, even if no-one else believes it. So she takes his lessons, hard though they are, and she studies them and she gets good at them. She puts on her best face even when it hurts, even when she wants to curl up and cry, and she tries — she really tries, she tries so hard — not to give in to the darker thoughts, the ones that want to do not-so-good things.

It’s dangerous, her magic. At least, that’s what her father says. Her mother didn’t really agree, Zelena knew, and she clings to the memory of her face because she has to believe that she was right. It’s not Father’s fault he can’t see as well as Mother could; he can’t see anything through all the drink.

She’s just about finished with her chores, exhausted and hungry and ready to go back inside, when she hears a strange rustling in the bushes nearby.

Her first instinct, naturally, is to shout for her father. He’s strong — she knows that better than anyone — and there’s no threat anywhere in Oz that he couldn’t defeat if he got angry enough. She stops herself before she can cry out, though, because she knows what happens when she disturbs him on bad mornings, and it’s far worse than anything she’s ever met in the woods. It’s safer, she knows, to deal with whatever unfamiliar monsters are lurking out there than risk waking the familiar one inside the house.

So she does. Unafraid and unflinching, not like most young girls would be. It’s not in any hurry to come out and face her, and that gives her courage. Why should she be wary of a monster that’s not even brave enough to show its face? She’s familiar enough with fear to recognise it in others. Whatever’s it is, it’s more afraid of her than she is of it.

A few more steps and she finds out why. It’s much smaller than she is, for a start, and it’s injured too. A rabbit, or maybe a hare, caught and struggling in one of her father’s traps. There’s no danger here, she realises, just a wounded little creature that can’t break free. She’s seen its frightened, pain-streaked face countless times before, in the mirror back at home.

The rabbit’s leg is a mess of blood, made worse for its futile feints at freeing itself. It would struggle itself to death if left to its own devices. Zelena knows this well; it’s the only sure-fire way to make sure someone stays trapped.

She crouches down in front of it, tries to figure out how to untangle the poor thing, how to pull the trap apart and set it free, but she doesn’t really understand how the thing works. She’s seen them before, but only from a distance; she doesn’t have a taste for blood the way her father does, the way most of the people do out here. It makes her uncomfortable, the way they slaughter things without so much as a thought.

Acting on instinct, she lifts her hand. The rabbit lets out a panicked, startled squeal, a strangely big sound from such a small creature, and she hushes it gently.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she whispers, still afraid of raising her voice even so far from the house. “I just want to help.”

She doesn’t expect her words to calm it, but somehow they do. She tells herself it must recognise the kindness in her, it must sense that she’s a friend, it must feel how desperate she is to do good. Strange, she thinks sadly, how an animal that can’t even speak can see things in her that her own father can’t.

It’s surprisingly easy to break the trap with magic. The steel and wire bend to her will, snapping and falling to pieces with the slightest wave of her hand. She doesn’t even need to touch it. She’s still very new to all of this — every spell feels like a test of her skill, a lesson for herself in what she can and can’t do — and it surprises her now just as it surprised her with the firewood, the moment when she feels potential growing into power, the subtle shimmers turning to something sparkling and searing, something real and true and all her own.

The rabbit tries to run away as soon as it’s free, but it doesn’t have the strength. It’s in too much pain, too damaged and broken and helpless. It limps maybe two or three steps, then falls over on its side and lies very still.

Zelena’s heart aches for the poor thing, and she lets the compassion fuel a different kind of magic.

“It’s all right,” she says. Her voice trembles, her head spins. “I’m going to make it better.”

Again, the little creature does what she says. It stops its futile struggles, and gets very still when she leans in to look at its leg, like it really does trust her.

The wound doesn’t look good at all. There’s so much blood that Zelena feels momentarily dizzy, punched in the stomach by the horror of it all, the pain that people inflict on little things that can’t defend themselves. She understands all too well how this poor little rabbit must be feeling, and how precious a gift it is that it’s willing to let her help. She doubts it ever had any reason to trust a human before.

She spreads her fingers, focuses on the magic in her chest, the warm place inside of her that just wants to help. The rabbit’s leg is hot and wet under her hand, but she’s wearing thick heavy gloves and doesn’t feel it at all. That’s probably for the best; she’s not sure she could concentrate if she had to feel the blood against her fingers, if she had to watch it seep into her skin.

It takes much longer to heal the poor thing than it did to set it free. Breaking things, it seems, is much easier than putting them back together. She wonders if it’s this wya for other people with magic or if she’s the only one who struggles like this. A sign of her wickedness, maybe, that pulling things apart comes so naturally to her while mending them is so hard.

She knows it should be the other way round. For so long she’s ached and longed to heal someone other than herself, but now that she finally has the chance to do it she finds herself clumsy and uncertain. She’s sure she can hear an echo in her head, can see a glimmer of a moment just like this, of someone lying motionless under her hands, of the healing magic rising up inside her, instinct and compassion overriding everything else inside her. She’s certain that she should just know, instinctively, how to do this, but the memory is gone, stolen away by the fever dreams.

It feels like forever before it’s done, before the rabbit is healed and whole and can stand on its own, and the strangest feeling rises up inside her as it readies itself to run. What fleeting connection she might have forged with it has vanished now; all it wants is to get away from her.

She should let it go. She knows that she should. It’s a small little thing, frightened and upset, and she is one of the monsters that hurt it. Of course it would want to run; she would too, if she could. She knows all that, she really does, but all she can think about is the way it let her help, the way it trusted her, if only for a moment, to set it free and heal its leg and make everything all better.

No-one has ever done that before. Father would sooner chew his own leg off than let her touch him with her wickedness, and Mother… well, she’s gone now, so what does it matter what she would do?

This is the first time, at least the first that she can remember, that someone actually wanted her to help, to use her talents for good, for healing, for not being wicked. She understands that animals have to be free, that they have no place among people, that the rabbit has every reason to want to get as far away from her as possible, but she just can’t help herself.

“Stop!” she cries, and waves her hand.

Freezing like a stone, the rabbit obeys.

Zelena stares. She had no idea magic could do that, had no idea her powers could reach that far. It frightens her a little, being able to control things like that, but it exhilarates her as well, makes her hungry in a way she’s never really felt before, like she hasn’t eaten anything in a very long time.

She turns her hand over, watches her fingertips slice the air. “Come back,” she says, testing the command on her tongue, and marvels when the rabbit does.

It doesn’t seem to have much say in the matter. Its face is frozen with fear, but its body moves like it’s drawn to her against its will, like she’s tugging on an invisible string and it has no choice but to follow.

“Good,” she says. She doesn’t care why it obeys, only that it does, that it won’t run away and leave her alone again. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’re friends now, see? I helped you, I healed you, I made you well again. You’re happy again because of me, and now we can be friends.”

It doesn’t argue. She tells herself that it doesn’t want to, that it feels the same way as she does, it’s just too nervous to really know it. It’s not _really_ that it has no choice; it just looks that way because itcan’t speak. Surely that’s right. It knows that she helped it, that she’s trying to be its friend, and so it’s doing whatever she says because it can’t express itself any other way.

She can feel the pull of magic inside her, the ebb and flow of it keeping time with the little creature’s movements, but that’s just a coincidence, right? People can’t actually _control_ things; that’s ridiculous. She can’t even control her own magic half the time, how in the world could she control another living creature?

But the more she tries, the more she can feel it, the drain on her strength, the power pulsing in her chest. It gets harder and harder the longer it goes on, wearing her out until she can’t ignore it or hide from it.

She tells the rabbit to run this way or that, and it obeys seemingly without thought. She tells it to sit in her lap, to let her hug it or feed it or play with it and it does, all the while looking lost and sad. Its movements are hollow, mechanical, and if she squints really hard she can almost see the freedom leeching out of it, just like hers does when her father raises his voice or the switch. The poor thing is scared — hard as she tries she can’t ignore the panic in its eyes, the twitching in its ears and nose — and it’s not right, it’s not what she wanted, it’s not _right_.

She didn’t want to _make_ the rabbit be her friend; she wanted it to _want_ to be. She looks down at her hands, struck with the horror of what they’re capable of, and for the very first time she understands the wickedness her father sees in her.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, stricken and tearful. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I didn’t… I only wanted a friend…”

She lets the rabbit go, then, and cries when it runs away. It’s so quick, its little legs a blur as it rushes off, like it can’t get away from her fast enough, like it’s more afraid of her than it was of the big mean trap that would have killed it if she hadn’t happened by.

She must truly be wicked, she thinks, if even the things she helps are frightened of her.

*

She magics the dirt and the blood from her clothes before going home.

That’s a terrible mistake. She should know better by now — she’s learned the lesson a thousand times in a thousand different colours — but she’s distracted and not really thinking clearly. She can’t seem to shake the memory of what’s just happened, what she just did, and no matter how hard she focuses, how desperately she tries to turn her power off, it seems that she can’t pull out her insides the same way she can pull off her gloves. No matter what she does it’s always right there, the loneliness, the ache to be loved and knowing that she doesn’t deserve it.

Cleaning her clothes is the closest she can get to cleaning her rotted, broken insides. And doesn’t he always say that she needs to put on her best face, to make the appearance of being good even when she’s the exact opposite? He would be so very angry if she showed up all dirty with mud and leaves and the dried blood of a wounded rabbit, so what choice does she have? Use her powers to transform herself into something more like him, or hold them in check and then get punished because she can’t be what he wants without them?

Whichever choice she makes, it’s always the wrong one. And now, just like always, he smells the magic on her before she’s even gotten her foot through the door.

She tries to be subtle, she really does. She makes her entrance as quietly and carefully as she can, scarcely making a sound in the vain hope that he’ll still be asleep, that he’ll stay asleep all day, all week, maybe even forever. But he doesn’t; he never does. For all the power she has crackling at her fingertips and blazing in her chest, that particular wish never seems to come true. He’s always right there, no matter what she does, eyes narrowed and jaw white, seeing through her skin and into her soul like there’s no space at all between the two.

“You did it again, didn’t you?” It’s not really a question. He knows the answer, or he wouldn’t have asked in the first place. “You gave in to your wickedness.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she mumbles, staring at the floor because it’s dangerous to look him in the eye when his temper is this hot. “I didn’t… I mean… it wasn’t…”

“Excuses!” His voice is thick, rough in the terrible way it gets when he hasn’t had a drink in a while, and his fist is already raised up, lessons stretching themselves out like cracks across his knuckles. “How many times have I told you?”

A hundred? A thousand? “I don’t know, Father.”

“Foolish child! You never listen, and you’ll never learn.” He’s close now, close enough that she can feel his breath, and the threats behind it, burning the skin on her face. “Not without a proper lesson.”

But she’s learned these lessons too, so well that she could recite them all by heart. She doesn’t tell him that her magic cleans her skin as well as her clothes, that it keeps his wickedness from overshadowing her own. She doesn’t tell him that that’s why she never carries his marks the next day. She doesn’t tell him anything because she’s not the only one who can’t retain the lessons she learns. It runs in the family, and isn’t it so ironic that this is the one thing she got from him.

“I warned you…” he says, like he does every time. “I _warned_ you…”

He did and he does, and he will again, but they both know it won’t change anything.

There’s a crack in the air as he pulls back his arm. She watches the muscles draw tight across his shoulders, pictures the lessons scrawled under the surface there. She knows it will hurt, knows exactly where the blows will land, where she’ll need to focus her magic later, and she’s afraid, of course she is, who wouldn’t be, but she is also so, so angry.

Time slows to a crawl, or at least it does for her. All she can see is his arm, frozen in place for what feels like a lifetime, the blissful split-second where she’s free to think _what if he misses this time?_ , only it stretches out longer and longer and longer. The fear simmers and boils itself away, the anger burning hotter and hotter, a flame in her chest that she wants so badly to take into her hand.

She won’t, though. She can’t. He might be cruel and violent, might revel in inflicting pain, but she is not like him, and she is not that kind of wicked.

Closing her eyes, shaking off the thoughts of fire, she lets her mind flood instead with memories of the rabbit outside, of the way it froze because she ordered it to, the way it obeyed her every word, bound to her will and whim seemingly against its own, the way it had no choice but to do whatever she said. It’s unkind, yes, but surely it’s kinder than setting someone on fire. Surely it’s less wicked than that. Surely…

Surely there’s not so much of a difference between man and beast?

She holds up a hand, flexes her fingers, feels the magic clip the air.

“Stop,” she whispers.

It’s too quiet to be heard, certainly too quiet to break through his temper, but that doesn’t matter. She is just starting to learn that it’s not the words that carry the power.

 _Stop,_ she thinks, letting her heartbeat catch the rhythm of her magic just like it did with the rabbit.

But, oh, a man’s will is stronger than a rabbit’s, and Father’s will has always been much stronger than hers.

“Stop,” she says again. Her voice cracks a little and so does her concentration, and _no no no_ , this is her only chance, the only thing she can do, and it has to work, it has to, it has to, it has to, it has to. “Father, _stop_.”

But he doesn’t.

*

Later, much later, he’s sleeping off another round of drink and she is very much awake.

It’s dark outside, and that means it’s dark inside too, the lights long since extinguished until there’s nothing left but the moon cutting jagged lines through the windows. It makes the walls look whiter than they are, but when she studies her reflection in the mirror she finds her skin sallow and green. The shadows spread out long and dark across her face, hiding the places where his lessons found their mark, but it doesn’t matter; hidden or not, they’ll all be gone by the break of day.

Healing has never come very easily to her, but it’s a skill she learned a long time ago, back when she was much smaller and much younger and the pain only grazed the surface. Skinned knees and scraped elbows, simple little things; she was always running around, never looking where she was going. She thought the world was safe back then, and her mother was always there to catch her and make her believe that it was. But she tripped and fell so often, and if Mother was discomfited by the way the bumps and scratches vanished, she never mentioned it.

 _“Just don’t let your father see,”_ she said, and then her smile got so very sad.

Zelena has never been very good at keeping her magic hidden, especially from her father. She tries, but the power — much like him — is so much bigger than she is. It roars, a lion caged up inside of her, and when it rises like a scream she’s not always strong enough or brave enough to try and tame it. She’s learning, slowly, oh so very slowly, to wait until he’s out of the house or else fast asleep but it’s not always easy to wait so long when the magic is so desperate to burst out of her.

She heals herself clumsily, uncertain and unsteady like she always is. For all her practice, she’s still not very good with mending magic; the skin on her face tingles where her hand passes over it, the sensation as unpleasant as the pain in its own way, and when she’s done it feels wrong under the surface, like she left something unfixed. Sometimes it’s simpler to just hide the pain behind a glamour than it is to make it disappear completely, but she tries anyway because she wants to be better, because she wants so badly to be good.

There’s a different kind of pain inside her when the bruises have gone, like an illness in her heart, discomfort spreading and spreading with every beat until she’s sure it will stop entirely. She feels ill, she feels lost, she feels more dirty now than she did when she was covered in mud and leaves and blood. She feels wrong, inside and out, and yes, despite her best efforts, she feels _wicked_.

She thinks again of the rabbit, the way it ran off as soon as she released it from her thrall, the way it was so frightened of her even after she helped it and healed it. She thinks of the half-forgotten fever dreams, the lingering laugh-sore ache in her ribs when she woke, the indistinct echoes of a mother that isn’t hers and a sister who never will be. She wonders where the sudden loneliness has come from; could it really be just because she misses her mother?

Father misses her too. Zelena is sure that’s why he drinks as much as he does now. She doesn’t know much about it, what drives a man to destroy himself and his daughter like that, but she knows that the drink is supposed to make things hurt less for a while. She wonders if she’ll fall into it as well, when she’s older.

She hopes not. She doesn’t want to be anything like him. She doesn’t want to hurt the people she loves, doesn’t want to hate and be afraid and feel angry all the time. She knows it’s there, simmering inside her already, all the anger and the pain and the misery; sometimes she can feel it wanting to twist and turn into something darker, something so close to hatred that it frightens her.

She resists, though, every time, because she doesn’t want to be like that. She wants to be good and kind; she wants to be someone who heals, someone who would never ever hurt anyone. She wants to be like her mother, the one she remembers and the one from her dreams.

It’s hard, though. It’s so hard trying to be good when no-one else believes that she’s capable of it. Her father calls her wicked; since Mother died it’s the only thing he ever calls her, and she’s been gone long enough now that Zelena can barely even remember her face or her voice. The fever dreams are fading now too, the foggy images of a mother and a sister, of another world so unlike this one, a world where she had the chance to help someone who needed her. She tries to cling to them, tries so hard to remember, but it’s like they were never really there at all, like ghosts in a fog of her own making.

She should go to bed, she knows. Sleep is the only place she’s safe, if only for a while. Still, though, she doesn’t because sleep will bring dreams and she doesn’t want any more of those. She’s too sad, too lonely, and she doesn’t want to conjure up false memories, moments that make her so happy then disappear when she wakes. It’s worse to wake with the memory of a happier life than it is to live her own knowing that such things will never be hers.

So she crawls to the window instead. The moonlight is brightest there, and it catches in her eyes when she throws the window open, a sting like the one she feels when she’s trying not to cry. She shivers, the chill more biting without the glass to protect her, and squints out past the yard and into the trees beyond.

He’s out there, she knows. The rabbit that didn’t want to be her friend, that ran away even after she made everything all better, the rabbit that was just as frightened of her wickedness as Father is. He could be miles away by now, but if she focuses enough and spreads her fingers and makes just the right gesture, she knows that she could summon him back. He’ll have to come; he won’t have a choice. Just like before when she told him to stop, if she told him to come back and ordered him to be her friend, he’d have to do it.

She could do that. She might not be able to stop her father when he raises his hand or his voice or the switch, but rabbits are much smaller than people and their heads aren’t nearly so full of noise or wants. Her power is limited, small and weak just like she is, but it’s strong enough for this, for a little animal that already has her magic inside him. She could make her voice heard, could make her power felt; she could find him and make him her friend, no matter where he is or what he wants. She knows that she could, and in that lost and lonely corner of her heart she wants to do it so desperately it makes her want to cry.

She doesn’t, though. She won’t. For all her loneliness and pain, for all that she would give anything in the world to remember how it feels to be wanted and loved, she can’t drag those feelings out of someone by force. She can’t make someone — even some _thing_ , even just an animal — care for her against their own will, and she can’t make them do things they don’t want to do just because she wants them for herself. She would give anything in the world for a friend who loves her, but not like this.

No matter how lonely she is, she won’t do that. No matter how sad or lost or hurt, she will never be broken into so many pieces that she can’t tell right from wrong.

She might be wicked, but she will never be that wicked.

***


	2. Chapter 2

***

“And it all belongs to her?”

Rumpelstiltskin giggles. It’s the strangest sound, short and sharp and impossibly high. Zelena has never heard anything quite like it before.

He’s enjoying this, that’s what the strange little giggle tells her. He’s enjoying her frustration, her jealousy, her bitterness, enjoying the resentment and hatred, all the vile, wicked things seething inside of her as she looks around at this strange new land. If he really is as powerful as the Wizard claims, he can probably feel it all simmering away inside her, can proably see all the places where she’s burned and rotted and twisted. What sort of a man is he, she wonders, that he relishes such things?

To answer her question, he throws his arms wide to take in the world around them, all the open space stretching out as far as the eye can see.

“Everything the light touches, dearie.”

That’s a lot. The kingdom — her _sister’s_ kingdom, she still hasn’t gotten over that part — is breathtaking, more beautiful than almost anything Zelena has ever seen, perhaps even more beautiful than the Emerald City itself. She’s never seen so much of everything, fields and valleys and tall grass that seems to go on forever; she’s never seen a horizon that wasn’t fringed with towers and painted in glowing, artificial green.

“All of it?” she asks again, because she can’t believe it, because she doesn’t want to believe it. “Everything? It’s all _hers_?”

“Yes, yes, all of it.” He giggles again, but there’s an edge to it now, bevelled with something like impatience. Well, she supposes she can’t blame him for that; she’s probably asked the same question twenty or thirty times by now. “Now, are you here to learn how to use your powers, or are you here to drool over your sister’s kingdom?”

“Can’t I do both?” She knows it’s the wrong answer even as she says it, but she can’t seem to stop herself. Her curiosity, to say nothing of the other unwanted feelings, are more powerful than the desire to learn, at least for right now. “I’m sorry. This is all just very new and strange to me. Yesterday I didn’t even know I had a sister, and now…”

“And now you do.”

He says it like it’s all so simple, like uncovering a new truth is all one needs to accept it and understand it, like her very existence hasn’t just been indelibly rewritten right in front of her. Here she is in a strange new land, one with more horizons and more colours than all of Oz put together, staring out at a kingdom that calls her sister — her _sister_! — their queen. How is she supposed to absorb any of that, much less accept it and move on? Does he really expect her to just snap her fingers and become one with this impossible new reality?

“She’s really a queen?” she asks for the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth time.

“And much more besides,” Rumpelstiltskin says, with a secret sort of smile.

Well. That part, Zelena can certainly believe. She’s known about Regina for all of five minutes and already she can tell the sort of person she is. All those pretty clothes and pretty trinkets, this pretty kingdom stretching out in all directions, everything anyone could ever hope for, and she has no idea how lucky she is. It took barely a glance into the Wizard’s little portal to learn all of that, to see the carelessness and indifference in this stranger who shares her blood.

Regina has no idea how many precious, priceless gifts have landed in her lap, what sort of a nightmare she escaped just by being born at the right time, how much worse her life could be if fate had tilted just slightly in a different direction.

Did their mother, Cora, ever tell Regina that she was wicked for having magic? Did her father ever raise his voice or his hand against her? No, of course not. You don’t wrap a daughter up in silks and perfumes and precious stones if you think she’s worthless.

Zelena tries to picture the look on Regina’s face when she learns she has a sister. Excitement, maybe, but only for a moment. Then derision and disgust, the same things she always sees when people meet her. _“A sister, how exciting! But no, this can’t be right. Just look at her, she’s so crass and classless!”_

It’s true, of course. Regina is stunning, resplendent in blacks and reds and purples, the perfect vision of a perfect queen. Royalty is practically dripping from her, power seeping from every pore; is it any wonder that she’s the one Cora chose? Next to her, Zelena feels like something lower than the peasant she is, like the very worst things she saw in her father the nights she had to fish him out of the gutter, the mornings he couldn’t shave himself, the days when he took his own wickedness out on her.

Regina’s face is lineless and perfect, the most beautiful face Zelena has ever seen. She’s probably never been touched in anger, by her parents or anyone else. No, she’s probably _worshipped_ by _everyone_.

“What did she do to deserve all this?” she asks, all but forgetting Rumpelstiltskin’s even there. “Why her and not me?”

“Who knows?” he says, but she can read between the lines on his face and it’s pretty obvious that he does. “Now chop-chop, dearie. I may have a few lifetimes under my belt, but I don’t have all day.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she turns away from the horizon. “I’m sorry.”

“Now, now. No apologies. That’s your first lesson.” He shows off his teeth, as sharp as his laughter. “Now, are you ready for your second?”

*

Rumpelstiltskin’s lessons are very different from her father’s.

For a start, they don’t leave any marks. Zelena isn’t sure how to react to that; she’s used to having to clean up after the things she learns, used to feeling sad and frightened afterwards, used to feeling like a failure even when she’s not really done anything wrong. She’s used to flinching at the slightest movement, apologising for the least little mistake; she’s used to being cowed and beaten for her magic, not praised and rewarded.

It got worse in the few weeks before she left. Lately, it seemed that Father couldn’t even endure an hour before his hands started to shake, before the rest of him followed suit, before he stopped seeing clearly and started seeing wickedness in everything she did.

Zelena is the first to admit that she has a difficult time controlling her magic — it bursts out of her at the most inopportune moments, overpowered by her emotions, and she’s so often helpless to its whims — but lately he’d started seeing it even when there was nothing there, raising his voice or his hand or the switch even when she hadn’t given him any reason, even when she really had been good.

It made her angry, the false accusations, the endless cries of _‘wicked’_ and _‘worthless’_ and _‘stupid child’_ , the punishments coming thick and fast for no reason at all. He never listened, never even tried to believe her. It made her so angry, so upset, and of course the heat of it made her lose control all over again. The magic might not have existed the first time he ‘saw’ it, but it was always real the second time.

Of course those were the only moments he remembered. Not the dozens of times he got it wrong, only the one or two when he was right, when she drowned in her temper and set fire to the tablecloth or the curtains. He never remembered her goodness, only her wickedness.

Until yesterday, until the Wizard showed her Regina, she couldn’t have ever imagined a land where magic is a gift, a world where it’s not seen as something wicked but something wonderful, where a great and powerful man like Rumpelstiltskin might sense the power in an angry, frightened, lonely young woman and take her on as his protégé. Just yesterday, all of this was so far beyond her wildest dreams, but today it’s real and true and happening to her.

She’s a diligent student, but nervous and sometimes skittish. She’s so used to mistakes coming with a price, to lessons blooming in black and blue across her face, to the slightest movement being the prelude to a fist; she had no idea that the fear was burned so deeply inside her until Rumpelstiltskin raises a hand to demonstrate and she flinches back anticipating a blow.

She still apologises when she loses control, though by now he’s told her not to a dozen times. He says her anger is her power, that it’s what makes her magic, that she will be unstoppable if she can just learn to master it. She doesn’t know if she believes that, but she knows that when dawn breaks and the lesson ends she believes, for perhaps the first time in her life, that she maybe she is worth a little something after all.

“Good,” he says, as though reading her thoughts. “That’ll do for a start. Now rest up. We’ll begin again at sundown.”

It’s an odd choice of time for a lesson, and she blinks a bit. “Sundown?”

“They don’t call it ‘magic hour’ for nothing, dearie,” he says, with another little giggle. Zelena blinks; frankly, she had no idea they called it that at all. “Now, off you go. See the sights, get some sleep, go stare some more at your sister’s kingdom, if you’re feeling masochistic. Just be back here at sundown with your wits about you.”

“I can do that,” Zelena says, perhaps a touch too enthusiastically.

“You wouldn’t be much of a student if you couldn’t, now, would you?” He studies her for a moment, eyes narrowed, then waves the thought off with a shrug. “Run along.”

So she does. Her head is reeling, spinning with all this new information, the parts of herself she’s spent so long trying to hold down or push back or pretend aren’t there. She’s never been encouraged like this before, never been treated like she’s worth more because of her powers. She’s not nearly so naïve as to think that she’s learned everything there is to know about her magic — her _gift_ , the Wizard called it — but she feels more comfortable in her skin now than she has in almost as long as she can remember. Not wicked, not any more. No, she finally feels right.

As unfamiliar as she is with this new land, she doesn’t really know where to go or what to do. She wants to go with Rumpelstiltskin, wants to follow him around and learn more just by being in his presence, but she can tell by the look on his face that it’s not a good idea. She’s not quite so afraid of punishment any more, but she doesn’t want to make him so angry he decides to stop teaching her. So she’ll behave, do as he says. She will look around this strange place, learn about her past here.

She looks down, feeling confused and out of her depth. Until yesterday, she’d never been out on her own before, had never ventured more than a mile or two away from home. She’s not sure what to do when she’s not being told, when her father isn’t standing over her snarling orders through curled lips. Rumpelstiltskin makes for a strange substitute, encouraging and laughing where her father would froth and rage, but he fills that void, that need for someone to guide her.

All alone now for the first time, without either one of them to tell her what to do, she finds herself almost overwhelmed. She’s never had a chance to think about her own desires before, her own needs or wants, her place in this great wide world, a world so much bigger and stranger than she ever imagined it could be.

Now, free to think and feel without holding herself down, she wants everything. She wants to see and hear and learn and understand all the things that were ripped away from her or beaten out of her. She wants to know about her sister, this Regina who got everything, and she wants to know about this kingdom that just fell into her lap, this kingdom that was so important her mother gave away her first-born child so that the next one might have it.

She looks down at the silver slippers, snug on her feet. _“They’ll take you where you want to go,”_ the Wizard told her, and there’s only one place in this strange new land that she can think of.

“Take me back to her palace,” she says, and brings her heels together.

*

Well, close enough, anyway.

The slippers deposit her a short distance away from the castle proper, far enough that she gets a dizzying view of it all, the towers and the great big windows and everything else. Maybe the slippers are cleverer than she thought; maybe they know how to keep her out of sight and thus out of trouble. She didn’t give very much thought, admittedly, to what might happen if she materialised in Regina’s bedroom just as Her Bloody Majesty was getting out of bed or something. Zelena has no shortage of reasons to resent her sister for everything she has and doesn’t even know, but even she wouldn’t want to scare her to death on their first meeting.

She stands there, outside, staring up at the great tall towers and wondering what it must be like to live in a place as vast as this. It’s only the one building, or so it seems, but it’s bigger than the whole of the Emerald City and then some. Don’t they get lost in there?

She wonders if Regina has servants too, lowly little people scurrying back and forth doing her royal bidding, ready to turn the whole world on its head to give their queen whatever her heart desires. How cruel, Zelena thinks, that while she spent her life shaving and serving and fearing her adoptive father, her sister was living it up with a swarm of loyal vassals who live only to do those things for her.

The thought makes her blood boil, makes the magic seethe in her chest, hotter and hotter and hotter, until she almost can’t stand it, until she thinks it will sear right through her veins and her skin, until she’s sure it will burn her alive.

She turns away from the castle, the palace, the city-sized building where her sister lives and rules over a whole bloody kingdom. She has to turn away, has to close her eyes and her thoughts to it, or else she’ll scorch the place to ashes.

Eyes shut, breathing shallow, she fights to control herself. That’s always been her problem, control. She couldn’t control her magic back in Oz and so her father despised her, and she can’t control her temper now that she’s here, now that she’s finally found a place where magic isn’t wicked, a place where she doesn’t have to be wicked either.

 _“You need to think of a moment of happiness,”_ Rumpelstiltskin told her last night, _“to rein in some of that anger.”_ She wraps that advice around herself again now, just like she did when he was teaching her, when he opened up and told her about his moment.

“He chose me,” she whispers to the empty air. “You may have the kingdom and the palace and everything else I never did, but I got him. I get to be his student, his protégé. Because I’m stronger. Because I’m better. Because—”

“Excuse me?”

Zelena whirls around, eyes snapping open. For a crazed, wishful moment, she’s sure that it’s Regina, that she’s somehow found out about her mysterious older sister and come looking for her. She has magic too, doesn’t she? Surely it’s no task at all to appear behind someone without a sound? And who wouldn’t be just a little bit curious if they found out they had a sister they didn’t know about? It worked on Zelena; why wouldn’t it work on Regina too?

It’s not Regina, though. It’s a young girl with wide eyes and pale skin, and Zelena doesn’t even bother trying to hide her disappointment.

“You’re not her,” she says, rather unnecessarily. “You’re too small.” She leans in, studies the girl closely for a moment or two. “And too _cheerful_.”

The girl blinks a couple of times. She’s not really smiling or anything, but Zelena can tell that ‘cheerful’ is a colour she wears very well. She’s got a bright, eager young face, round in the way that healthy, happy children’s faces tend to be, and she’s wearing a dress that, if sold, could probably buy Father a week’s worth of drink all at once.

“I’m sorry,” the girl mumbles, though Heaven only knows what she’s apologising for. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t _startle_ me,” Zelena snaps, bristling. “It’s just rude, sneaking up on people like that.”

The girl nods, but doesn’t apologise again. “Are you lost?” she asks, a little too casually. “You look like you’re lost.”

Well. What a question that is. In a manner of speaking, Zelena supposes she is, yes. Certainly, she has no idea where to go or what to do, or even how she should be feeling. Everything is strange and new and unclear, not just in this land but inside herself as well; there’s a part of her that is excited, thrilled beyond words, but it’s eclipsed by the smaller, louder part that is angry and upset, the part of her that never really grew up, that her father never allowed to grow up. If she grew up, if she got too old or too clever, she might learn to do more with her magic than make stupid childish mistakes; if she grew up, she might learn that a grown woman, a woman as powerful and dangerous as she is, doesn’t need to spend her life taking care of a sad old drunk. If she grew up, even just the least little bit…

But that’s not what this child is talking about. She can’t see into Zelena’s head, can’t see how lost she truly is. This girl is naïve and foolish; all she can see is the grass beneath her feet, and so Zelena will not indulge her.

“No,” she says. Her voice echoes strangely on the morning air; she sounds so different from the people here. She wonders if the child is clever enough to recognise that, if she can tell from her voice that she’s not from this world, that she doesn’t belong here. “No, I’m not lost. I’m just passing through.”

“Oh.” The girl beams, a bright-eyed sunburst of a smile that lights up her face and everything around her. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere in particular.” That’s true enough. She doesn’t really have a home any more; she only has her teacher, the man she met just yesterday. All her hopes and dreams hang on him. “I just saw the castle, and I thought…”

If such a thing is possible, she’d swear the girl’s smile gets even bigger. She draws herself up to her full, tiny height and says, “That’s _my_ castle.”

“Yours?” Zelena frowns, perplexed. “I heard it belonged to… to Queen Regina.” Her tongue trips over her sister’s name; it leaves a bitter, savage taste in the back of her throat.

The girl scoffs. “Well, I _suppose_ ,” she says, precocious and superior, like she’s the mature one here and Zelena is the child who doesn’t know anything. “But it’s still _mine_.”

Zelena narrows her eyes, annoyed by the attitude. She bends over a little to get a better look at this strange, self-possessed little creature, trying to figure out who or what she is.

She doesn’t look very much like Regina, or how Zelena imagines Regina might have looked when she was that age; she’s paler, for a start, and her face is rounder and warmer. Her eyes are bright, so incredibly bright; Regina’s, in the brief glance Zelena got of her through the Wizard’s portal, were dark and gleaming, the eyes of a woman always plotting and planning and scheming. This girl looks like she wouldn’t recognise a plot if it swooped out of the sky, turned into a cyclone, and carried her off to another land.

She does have the air of royalty, though, or at least the air of someone who believes they’re royalty. Zelena takes her face in her hands, leans in to look her in the eye, and says, “And who are you, then?”

The girl gasps a little. Not at the contact, it seems, but at the lack of recognition. _You don’t know me?_ , she seems to be thinking, and Zelena wants to shake her until she gets her answers.

After a beat or two, the girl pulls away and says, “I’m Snow White.”

Zelena scoffs. “That’s not a name, it’s a colour.”

“It is _so_ a name,” Snow White says. “It’s _my_ name. And my father rules this whole kingdom, and soon it’ll be mine too.”

“Well, someone thinks pretty highly of herself,” Zelena mutters, and rolls her eyes.

“It’s _true_!” The girl stomps her foot. Zelena knows that juvenile, petulant temper all too well; she carries it herself. “Where are you from, anyway, if you don’t even know that?”

What a delicious question that is. Zelena would laugh if she didn’t think it would give her away. “Nowhere you would’ve heard of.”

“Liar.” Snow pouts again. “I’m a _princess_. I’ve heard of _everywhere_.”

Zelena laughs. She can’t help herself. This tiny little child-thing, talking about the world as though she has any idea how vast and unfathomable it is. She wonders what would happen if she mentioned the Emerald City, if she said she came from the land of Oz; would Snow White pretend she knows all about it, or would she drop her jaw and call her a liar again? Neither idea is particularly appealing, so Zelena just shrugs and changes the subject. Who cares about places, anyway? She’s got far more important things to learn here.

“Tell me, then, princess,” she says, dipping her toes in murkier waters. “Do you have any sisters?”

It’s not exactly a complicated question, but still Snow seems to need a moment to think about it. “I dunno. Does Regina count?”

Zelena feels her chest seize up. “Regina?” she chokes. “She’s _your_ sister?”

She almost says _‘as well’_ , but she stops herself before she can give too much away. Still, the look on Snow White’s face is just thoughtful enough to make her panic a little. Her hands start to shake, twitching tremors like the ones that wracked her father, so she hides them behind her back before this precocious little girl can spot it.

After another brief pause, Snow shrugs. “I suppose not.” It’s so careless, the way she says it, like this isn’t the most important conversation she’ll ever have in her stupid little life. “I mean, she married my father. So I suppose that makes her my mother, right? But she doesn’t really act like a mother.”

Zelena wants to scream, but she doesn’t. She just asks, in a voice much steadier than she feels, “She acts like a sister, then?”

“Sometimes,” Snow says, then sighs heavily. “I don’t know. Maybe I just wish she was. You know? She’s so kind and thoughtful and wonderful…”

“Wonderful,” Zelena echoes. She feels sick. “Regina? The queen?”

Snow nods a few dozen times. “She saved my _life_ ,” she says, and suddenly all that childish pretension bleeds away into breathless awe.

Zelena turns away. There’s a horrible taste in her mouth, acid and bitterness and spite; it tastes like an apple gone too sour to eat, or maybe one rotted through to the core. Of course Regina is wonderful, of course everyone loves her, of course she saved the bloody princess’s life. There had to be some reason why their mother chose her, doesn’t there? There had to be a reason why she was good enough to make a queen, a reason why she was worth keeping while Zelena got tossed into a sodding cyclone.

“Damn her,” she whispers.

Her voice is strangled, though, choked with the taste of so much resentment, and of course little Snow White notices it.

“Are you all right?” The worry is genuine, Zelena can tell. Somehow, that makes it worse. “You don’t look so good.”

“I…” But the words won’t come.

Snow gives a knowing, condescending little nod. “My father says if you’re feeling green you should just lie down and—”

“I’m fine,” Zelena blurts out, finding her voice in a rush. The lie is crude, but anything is better than listening to this little brat spout wisdom at her. She closes her eyes for a moment, focuses on the matter at hand. “She sounds perfect. Regina, that is. The perfect queen. The perfect sister. The perfect everything.”

When she trusts herself to turn back and face the girl, she finds Snow beaming again. It’s the exact same smile as before, the one that blazes as bright as the sun in this land, but it awakens a very different feeling in Zelena’s chest this time. She feels like she did when Father taught her how to shave him, squeezing her wrist tightly enough to bruise, holding her in place so she would know she couldn’t escape. His smile wasn’t bright, but it did blaze. It was the only one he ever wore, the smile that was secretly a threat.

Snow White’s smile is as far from that one as anything can be, but _oh_ , it cuts just as keenly. Snow’s smile is dazzling, a wash of love and light and warmth. It’s the purest, most honest smile Zelena has ever seen, but it’s meant for Regina, and the sight of it makes her feel more wretched and wicked than anything her father ever did.

“She is,” Snow says dreamily. “She’s so very perfect.”

*

The next thing Zelena knows, they’re touring the palace grounds.

Snow White is like a puppy, refusing to let go of a toy; she thinks she’s found a new friend, and now she wants to show her everything. Well, Zelena’s used to that by now, being an object for other people to play with, and so she lets it happen and doesn’t complain.

In any case, she’s curious about this place; melancholy and just a little morbid, she wants to see this life she’s missed out on. There’s a reason she made the slippers bring her here, after all, and though she’s definitely not ready to meet her sister just yet, still the part of her that Rumpelstiltskin so accurately called ‘masochistic’ wants to see for herself all the wonderful, impossible, unfair things that Regina doesn’t deserve.

Snow is more than happy to share those particular details; the girl simply adores talking about herself and her things. They don’t go inside the palace grounds — “visitors aren’t allowed without invitations,” Snow says, with the sullen ring of someone who’s never been truly punished for breaking stupid rules — but they cover everything else in painstaking, infinite detail. The grounds go on forever, it seems, but Snow has no shortage of stories to tell about them. Boring children’s tales, mostly, but Zelena’s ears prick up whenever Regina’s name is mentioned.

For her part, the little princess is sickeningly endearing. She smiles all the time, talks about the world like someone who’s never truly had to live in it, and she dances almost more than she walks. She’s spoiled and insufferable, yet still somehow Zelena finds that she loathes her less than Regina. Maybe it’s because she’s still so young; Zelena can still feel that innocence in herself sometimes, when she’s feeling generous, when she looks back on her own childhood and marvels at how it all went so wrong. Snow White still has the chance to grow up better, to grow up _good_.

Zelena envies her that, but she doesn’t resent her for it. Not like she resents Regina. She never saw Regina at this age, never knew her when she was innocent. How is she supposed to understand what it was like for her when she never got to see it for herself?

Innocence is like a second skin on Snow White, though. Even the animals seem to sense it; they seem almost infatuated with her. They follow her around, trailing along behind them like a procession as they meander the grounds, loyal as her loving subjects.

When she notices that, the animals trailing behind as though in thrall, Zelena feels a quickening in her chest, excitement coloured by caution.

“You know magic?” she asks, a whisper that feels like a secret.

Snow White stares at her for a very long time, blinking and frowning and generally looking like Zelena is the stupidest person she’s ever met.

“Of course not,” she says. “They just like me, that’s all.”

Zelena doesn’t understand. How is it even possible to make things like you without using magic?

She reaches out, tries to touch one of the little critters. A bluebird, small and fat; it’s sitting on Snow’s shoulder, as happy as anything, but it panics when Zelena reaches for it, lifting up and fluttering away.

 _That_ , she thinks, upset and vindicated at the same time. That’s what’s supposed to happen without magic. Animals don’t just _like_ people. Not even when they save their sad little lives.

Snow White grabs her wrist, stopping her before she can try again. “Not like that,” she chides. “They’re small and fragile and stuff. You have to be kind and gentle.”

But that’s just it: Zelena _was_ being kind and gentle. At least, she was trying to be. But how is she supposed to know how to be those things when she’s never experienced them for herself? Kindness and gentleness, the kind of sickening sweetness that radiates from Snow White… they’ve been completely absent for so much of Zelena’s life. The only time she ever felt them at all was when her mother was still alive, and she’s—

_—not really your mother._

That’s right. Zelena only thought she was her mother, tricked by a pretty face and a moment of false compassion. And that’s another reason why it doesn’t work, why she can’t be kind or gentle, why she can never touch the animals or charm them like Snow White does. The only love she ever knew was a lie.

“It’s easier with magic,” she grumbles, mostly to herself. “I could just make them do as I say. They wouldn’t be able to deny me.”

Snow stares at her, slack-jawed and bordering on horror. “But that’s _wrong_ ,” she cries, with all the wide-eyed wonder of someone who has no idea what ‘wrong’ really is. “You can’t just make them do things they don’t want to! They have _feelings_.”

 _So do I_ , Zelena thinks sadly. _But no-one ever cared about mine, did they?_

*

Later, when Rumpelstiltskin is teaching her to magic herself from one side of the room to the other, she asks him about it.

“Can you use magic to change someone’s feelings?”

He gives her a strange look, eyebrows raised and lips thinned, and doesn’t say anything for a long while. She waits, the smoke clearing around her — teleportation, it seems, is one of the easier tricks to master, far more so than healing — and feeling the magic grow slack and fuzzy inside of her.

It always takes longer, coming down from the spell than summoning it in the first place, and she often finds herself a little breathless even after the simplest tricks. She’s never had to concentrate so hard for so long at once; she’s never really done anything like this on purpose. Before, it just sort of happened. Now, at long last, she’s actually trying, and the effort makes her weak and achey.

Finally, just as her body is starting to feel like her own again, Rumpelstiltskin shakes his head. “No.”

That’s it. Just the one word. She’s barely known him a day, but already she knows enough to know that’s not like him.

“Why not?” she presses.

She’s not really interested in the technical details, the laws of physics or whatever else that makes magic what it is, but she wants more out of him than one stupid syllable. So far as she can tell, the answer to almost any question about magic is just _‘because’_ , but Rumpelstiltskin is her teacher and she wants to learn about him just as much as she wants to learn about the power shimmering inside her. He’s not exactly forthcoming with personal details, not unless she pushes, and so that’s what she does, teasing details out of him as expertly as he teases the green smoke and power out of her.

“Because I said so,” he says. Then, after another long, heavy moment, “Some things aren’t meant to be toyed with.”

“Why not?” she says again. “If we can make them _do_ what we want, why can’t we make them _feel_ what we want too?”

That’s not really what she means, but it’s the only way she can think of to phrase it. For all her talent with magic, she’s never been very good at expressing herself. She speaks like an idiot, like the awkward, stupid child her father always said she was, and it’s by only sheer determination, the desperate need not to look foolish in front of her new teacher, that she keeps herself from blushing.

Rumpelstiltskin spends another long moment looking at her, like he’s picking apart the words and putting them back together in a different order, like he’s plucking the real questions out of her brain and pondering them. Is it really so very different, she wonders, stealing the thoughts out from someone’s head and changing the shape of them? Why isn’t she allowed to do that too?

At long last, Rumpelstiltskin sighs and says, “Because that’s not the way it works.”

“But wh—”

“My, my.” He clucks his tongue, and gestures idly at nothing in particular. “You do ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, then catches herself. _No apologies._ “It’s just that I’ve never really had anyone I could ask. I’ve got all this magic, all this power inside of me, and I’ve never been able to talk about it before.”

“Now, that’s quite the accusation, dearie.” There’s the ghost of a reprimand behind his voice, subtle but sharp. “Weren’t _able_ , you say?”

“Well, I wasn’t _allowed_.” She sighs. “It’s the same thing.”

“Is it really?”

She knows the answer, of course, and has to bite her lip to keep from growling her frustration. “No-one was binding my tongue, if that’s what you mean.”

Rumpelstiltskin raises both eyebrows, curious and a little teasing. “So what stopped you?”

“I was afraid.” Her voice comes out high and pained, the way it gets when she forgets she’s supposed to be a grown woman; it’s more petulance than innocence, but it makes her feel terribly vulnerable just the same. “If I talked about it, I’d be punished. Yelled at, or… or worse. You don’t…” She shuts her eyes, transported back to Oz for just a heartbeat, the magic of memory more potent than anything she can conjure herself. “You don’t talk about these things. You mustn’t let your insides show. No matter what you feel, you have to… you have to put on a good face."

“I see.” He doesn’t look particularly sympathetic, though. He doesn’t really look like he cares at all. “And I suppose you’d just…” He gestures with one hand, then snaps his fingers. “…whisk the fear away if you could?”

“Of course,” she says. How is that even a question? “It would make everything easier.”

“Ah, but would it really?” There’s glee behind his eyes, like he’s relishing her pain the way he relished her bitterness last night. It makes the anger start to seethe again, ignites a furnace in her chest to burn away the old cold. “You’d still be punished, whether you were afraid or not. More so, wouldn’t you say, without that voice in your head warning you to hold your tongue.”

“Well, maybe.” The admission is grudging, the truth unwelcome. “But I don’t—”

“Emotions exist for a reason, dearie.” He’s very serious now, the spiteful joy vanished like smoke. “In ourselves and in others, and whether we like them or not. They’re not toys to be thrown away when you get bored, or opinions to be changed on a whim. They’re as tied to our survival as breathing. We do not trifle with them.”

Zelena shakes her head, upset. “So it’s… what? Better to just control people against their will? People or… or animals? Anyone or anything we like? Better to just force them to do things they might not want to than change their feelings so they’ll do it of their own free will?” She doesn’t understand. She wants to, so badly, but she can’t. “In what universe does that make any sense?”

“I’m not here to teach you sense,” he says, quick as a whip. “I’m here to teach you magic. As you’ll soon learn, they’re not very much alike.”

Yes, she’s already learning that. It’s not easy, though, and all the more so because she’s discovering it all for the first time. Regina, raised by their mother, probably knew everything there was to know about her ‘gift’ from the day she was born. No doubt she understands all of this like it’s second nature. She probably never asks any questions, probably just does what she’s told like a good student. How wonderful for her, Zelena thinks hatefully, to be blessed with always knowing exactly who and what she is.

“But, then, how will I know?” she asks. Her voice shakes a little, giving away the deeper doubts, the part of her that has so much more to prove than her power. “How will I be able to tell if what I’m doing is right? How am I supposed to keep it straight in my head if the rules don’t make any sense? How…” She closes her eyes for a second, not even a second really, and pictures her father’s face. “How can I make sure I don’t become wicked?”

“You can’t, of course,” Rumpelstiltskin says, with a dark, glittering smile. “Magic is not for the faint of heart, dearie. If a little moral ambiguity is enough to make you squeamish…” He waves a hand, not with magic this time but with a kind of dismissal; somehow that makes it more of a threat. “Well, then, I suppose I’ll just have to go back to your sister, won’t I?”

“No!” She blurts it out in a panic, like a plea. She might be ashamed of herself, embarrassed by the show of desperation, but she’s never had that much pride, and this is too important to squander on shame. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. I was just wondering, I was just curious, I was just…” Her voice is rising, high and squeaky and childlike. “It’s not important. I’ll figure it all out for myself, just you wait and see. I’ll figure it out, I’ll learn everything there is to know, I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Will you, now?”

Zelena swallows down her doubts, her uncertainties, even her fears. She swallows down all the parts of her that have been struggling alone with this terrible, heavy burden for as long as she can remember, the parts of her that made her father sneer and swear and use the switch. She’s already learned so many lessons from her magic, her power, her _wickedness_ , and now she finally has someone who can teach her the right ones, the ones she never even knew existed.

She won’t let her qualms ruin that. She won’t let herself be tainted by her father’s cruelty or Snow White’s romantic notion of ‘gentle’ and ‘kind’. There’s no-one here but her now, and she has no-one to answer to but herself and her new teacher.

“Yes,” she says, far too quickly. “Yes, I’ll do anything. I promise I will. Whatever it takes. I’ll turn all the animals in the forest into your slaves if you ask me to. People, too, if that’s what you want. Anything!”

 _How wrong can it really be,_ she thinks, _if it’ll make you choose me over her?_

Rumpelstiltskin’s smile sharpens to a knife’s edge, dazzling and deadly under the moonlight.

“Very well, then,” he says. “But no more questions, eh, dearie?”

Breathless and hopeful for the first time in her life, Zelena nods. She’s too eager, she knows, too optimistic, but she can’t help herself. If he doesn’t care what’s good or bad, why the hell should she? She’s spent her whole life being told that she’s a bad person, a horrible person, a monstrosity. She’s spent her whole life being told she’s wicked like that’s the worst thing in the world, and now for the first time she’s looking at someone who doesn’t care at all. She doesn’t have to choose between goodness and wickedness here; if Rumpelstiltskin is to be believed there’s no difference between them. There’s only her magic, her _gift_ , and the first person she’s ever met who appreciates it.

“No more questions,” she promises.

Rumpelstiltskin giggles again, clapping his hands together like an excited child. For just a moment, Zelena remembers Snow White, all innocence and purity, loved by everyone, even the animals, even Regina. Then the image is gone, replaced by one of herself at the same age, loved and wanted by nobody at all.

Well, not any more. Now, for the first time in her life, she gets to know how it feels to be wanted, to be loved, to be valued. All that other nonsense, the pain and the fear, the anger, the lack of control… that’s all in the past.

Whatever it takes, she’ll make sure it stays there.

***


	3. Chapter 3

***

The flying monkey is easier to control than rabbits or bluebirds.

Well. Most of the time, anyway.

Sometimes he gets ideas and tries to rise above his station. It’s like he almost remembers that he used to be person — the Wizard, no less — and that he once had hopes and thoughts and aspirations of his own. He gets cagey, restless and uncooperative, and so she has to tighten the leash a little to keep him in line. It’s not the way she’d prefer to do things, but he doesn’t exactly leave her much of a choice. It’s so very hard to find good help these days, and who could blame a girl for taking matters into her own hands?

Glinda doesn’t. That’s unexpected, quite frankly. For someone with ‘good’ as part of her name, she’s astonishingly quick to shrug off Zelena’s less than humane treatment of the former Wizard as a fitting punishment for his deception.

Then again, that seems to be Glinda all over. Unexpected, surprising, and very quick to make the strangest judgement calls. She doesn’t even bat an eyelid when she saunters into Zelena’s chamber, doesn’t frown or blink to find that she’s made a home of the Wizard’s old haunt and that she’s playing with his little toys. For someone who claims to be the paragon of good, she doesn’t seem to care about much of anything at all. She’s actually pleased that Zelena took the Wizard’s fate into her hands, that she reduced him to a simpering simian and is bossing him around like a mindless slave.

 _“It’ll do him some good,”_ she says, and smiles like someone who knows too many secrets.

Zelena has seen that smile before; if she learned one thing from her time in the Enchanted Forest, it’s that it never bodes well. Naturally, then, she’s on her guard, refusing to take Glinda’s praise at face value. The last time she trusted someone who said she did something right, she was only disappointed. This time she’ll take her chances with doubt.

Glinda doesn’t act like Rumpelstiltskin, though. She doesn’t talk to Zelena like a teacher to a student, doesn’t try to guide her towards some unseen end destination. She’s not here to train her or turn her into a tool, and she doesn’t seem to want anything at all in exchange for her company. She’s just here, or so she says, to invite her somewhere else.

She uses the words _‘sisters’_ , not like Rumpelstiltskin did. He used the word as a weapon, a tool to bend her to his whim; when he spoke about Regina it was always coolly, carefully calculated to ignite the spark of resentment in Zelena’s chest, to make the anger more powerful so the magic would be too. But Glinda isn’t like that, and when she says that terrible word she makes it sound like a good thing, like a promise. Not _‘Regina is the sister you’ll never have’_ , but _‘if you can forget about her, I can give you the sister you’ve always wanted’_.

But oh, Zelena isn’t sure she has any more room in her heart for sisters, good or otherwise. She doesn’t want anyone else to make her feel the way she does when she looks through the portal and sees Regina’s face. She’s not entirely sure what it is that Glinda’s offering, but the idea sends a lance of panic straight through her heart. She doesn’t like it, doesn’t trust it, and there’s no explanation for the way she listens anyway.

Glinda has a way with words, seductive and fascinating. They sparkle on her tongue, turn to poetry on her lips, transform themselves into ethereal, beautiful things; it’s a kind of magic Zelena has never seen before. When she speaks of a far-off place called the Heart of Oz, the gleam in her eye makes Zelena want to see it for herself. It makes her want to cast away her doubts, the mistrust that has taken root in her bones ever since Rumpelstiltskin rejected her. It makes her want to cast away everything she ever thought she felt and run away with this woman she’s only just met.

Well, why not, she thinks, trying to justify it. She’s not exactly spoiled for things to do around here, is she?

Glinda holds out a hand when she agrees. It’s a delicate thing, graceful and pretty and wrapped in shimmering white silk. The hand is an offer, a gesture of kindness, of welcome, but Zelena doesn’t accept it. She’s not sure she trusts herself to touch another person without setting them on fire.

“It’s all right,” Glinda says softly. She’s smiling like she understands, like someone with ‘good’ in their name could ever understand the unwanted instincts that rise up inside the wicked. “Shall we go?”

So they do. Walking, without magic. Isn’t that quaint?

Glinda does all the talking; Zelena, for once, is content to listen, swept up in the musical magic of her voice. She talks about magic and power and sisterhood, talks about witches in a way Zelena has never heard anyone talk about them before: like there’s no real distinction between the good ones and the bad, like it’s all just in how you look at it.

She makes it sound like something complex, something intricate, far away from the simple, straightforward science Rumpelstiltskin said it was. Glinda’s words make the idea shine like a sort of sanctuary, a separate world that breathes in rhythm with the physical one but never quite touches it. It’s the exact opposite of everything Zelena has learned so far, everything she thought magic was.

“You can do so much more than you believe,” Glinda tells her, and her eyes sparkle like her words.

Zelena doesn’t point out that she already believes she can do anything. She just says, “I was doing perfectly well by myself, thank you very much.”

“Were you?” She’s smiling again. She does that a lot, Zelena’s noticed. It makes her stomach tense and turn, makes her feel strange, squirmy things inside. “Magic is different for everyone. You’ll never master yours by spying on your sister’s lessons. They’re meant for her, not you.”

“We share a mother,” Zelena reminds her. “We’re practically the same.”

Glinda laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, light and musical, like wind whistling through a chandelier. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Zelena mutters, not caring that she sounds sullen and petulant. “Nothing’s ever that bloody simple, is it?”

“I’m afraid not.” Glinda sighs. “You’re powerful, Zelena, but you’re also raw. Uncut. Like a diamond, or…” She stretches out a hand, fingertips hovering just a breath from Zelena’s face. Zelena flinches away, uncomfortable with the threat of contact. “…or an emerald.”

“Oh, give it a rest.” She’s not just sullen now, she’s angry. “You think I look like this by choice? It’s not something to draw attention to.”

Glinda’s smile gets even softer. Zelena wouldn’t have thought such a thing was possible.

“If you like,” she says, “I can help you to change that. Not just the way you look, but the way you feel, the way you think, even the way you connect to the world around you.” She doesn’t lower her hand. Zelena can’t seem to stop staring at her fingers. “You don’t have to be consumed by your envy forever, Zelena. If there’s a part of you that you don’t like, you can change it.”

“That’s rather optimistic,” Zelena shoots back. “You don’t even know me. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Blessedly, she doesn’t elucidate. “But of course, the choice has to be yours. If you want it, I’ll do everything in my power to help. If you don’t…” She studies her long and hard, then finally lets her hand fall away. “Well, that’s up to you. But for what it’s worth, I believe you can change.”

“I bet you believe in bloody fairies too,” Zelena says, with rather more spite than the situation calls for.

Glinda’s smile turns very sad. “Of course I do.”

Zelena mutters a few choice curses under her breath, but doesn’t press the matter further. It’s too easy, breaking an optimist, and for all the ways she’s grown into her wickedness she’s not ready to become that person just yet. No-one should be punished for believing in good things, even if they are completely and utterly deluded.

They walk on in silence. Glinda has grown contemplative, and Zelena is just grateful for the peace and quiet. She doesn’t do well with a lot of mindless chit-chat, doesn’t really know what to do with it. She was never taught how to be social, how to fill the spaces between someone else’s words. Before she learned the truth about her family tree, the only company she ever had was her father, and he didn’t often let her speak. And since then… well, for all his newfound obedience, the Wizard’s present form doesn’t make him much of a conversationalist.

That’s all for the best, to be quite honest. Since she got back from the Enchanted Forest, since she learned that she was just as unloved and unwanted in that world as she is in this one, since Rumpelstiltskin took her hopes in his hand and crushed them, Zelena’s interest in other people has rather withered. Glinda might yet be different, but they’ve only just met; she needs to prove it first.

Whether she senses Zelena’s reticence or not, Glinda nonetheless tries to respect it. She doesn’t force any more of her cock-eyed optimism down her throat, and she doesn’t try to coax the so-called ‘changes’ out of her before she’s ready. If she really does believe in her, like she says she does, apparently she also believes in giving her the space and freedom to get there on her own. Zelena’s not sure what that means, but she knows that it makes her heart quicken.

The next time Glinda speaks, they’re practically on the doorstep of their destination. Zelena still doesn’t know what the ‘Heart of Oz’ is supposed to be, but she can sense the magic spilling out over the dead leaves and dead mulch, and so she knows they must be close. She’s never been in the presence of so much power before, enough that she can almost taste it on her tongue, enough that she knows even without having to hear it said that they’re not the only witches here.

Glinda holds up a hand, halting their progress. There’s a hum in the air; Zelena thinks she sees lightning on her fingertips.

“Are you ready?” Glinda asks.

Suddenly nervous, almost frightened, Zelena manages a nod. “I think so.”

Glinda bows her head for a moment, as though in a kind of prayer.

“Good,” she says, and then the lightning catches her eyes as well.

*

It’s strange, being part of a sisterhood.

Stranger still is choosing one for herself. Zelena always assumed that family was unchangeable, set in stone like the passage of time. It got her through the worst nights with her father, the dark days after Mother died, reminding herself over and over and over that they were family, that she was his daughter and it was her place, her responsibility to take care of him. She never thought, not even for a moment, that the truth might be something vastly different. She certainly never imagined that family might be something a person can choose.

Her mother, her real one, chose to get rid of her, to cut her down from the family tree and raise up a new branch in her place. A random stranger, not a mother to anyone, chose to take her in her and make a daughter out of her. Zelena never had a say in either of those things; she never got to decide for herself which family was hers, whose poison would be left in her blood for the rest of her life. Now, for the first time, family means what she says it does.

Glinda is boundless in her faith, but the others are not. The two of them, North and East, they’re more cautious, and they look at her like they expect her to give in to her wicked ways at any moment. It might make her angry, only Glinda is a rock of optimism and when she’s in the room that’s all Zelena can see.

She talks endlessly, laughs that dancing-crystal laugh of hers, and when she talks to Zelena it’s like they’re the only two people in the whole of Oz. No-one has ever looked at her that way, believed in her so hard and so completely. Not even Rumpelstiltskin ever thought so highly of her; Zelena’s time under his guidance was brief, perpetually eclipsed by Regina, and the only time he ever looked at her was when he needed to correct her stupid mistakes.

Zelena fell too easily under his spell. She realises that now. She was seduced like a child would be by the fantasy of power and control, by the promise of more and more and _more_. She had never been appreciated before, had never been treated as anything more than an unwanted burden, and his attentions, brief though they were, were thoroughly intoxicating.

It’s different with Glinda. Zelena is cautious now, untrusting in a way she wasn’t when Rumpelstiltskin offered to teach her. She’s been burned too many times by now to delude herself that it’s coincidental. She was burned by her father, by both her mothers, the one who abandoned her and the one who died and left her to suffer, by her sister and by teacher and by the cheating lying Wizard, by anyone and everyone who ever looked on her. It’s too much; it would be too much for anyone. She will never trust blindly again, not even to someone as beautiful and trusting as Glinda.

Glinda has a lot of work to do if she wants to break through all those barriers, the shimmering shades of green that still threaten under Zelena’s skin. It looks normal again now, transformed by her decision to stay here, to dismiss her old sister and join her new ones, but the potential for wickedness is still there and it probably always will be. She still has a long, long way to go before she is truly free, but Glinda tells her it’s worth the wait.

“Why?” Zelena asks, the next time they’re alone.

She doesn’t feel at home here yet, and she’s still uncomfortable asking questions in front of the other two; it’s not that she doesn’t trust them, it’s just that she knows they don’t trust her. They look at her strangely sometimes, like they can see something she can’t, and she doesn’t feel safe speaking her mind when they’re around. It’s just her and Glinda now, though, just the two of them in Glinda’s private chambers, and the others aren’t around to pass their snide, whispering judgement.

Glinda blinks a couple of times, then frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

“Why?” Zelena asks again. “Why do you trust me? Why do you believe I can change? All you know about me is what you’ve read in that book of yours. Why put so much faith in me?”

Glinda smiles. She does that so often. “Have I been wrong yet?”

“I don’t know,” Zelena says, trying not to pout. “I’ve only been here five minutes. A week or a month down the line…” She sighs, feeling the old familiar wretchedness awakening inside her again, her father’s voice telling her over and over that she’s more trouble than she’s worth. “What will you do if I disappoint you? If I…”

“You won’t,” Glinda says. “I know you won’t.”

She leans in, cupping Zelena’s cheek with an intimate sort of fondness. The contact lands like a blow, and it rips the breath out of Zelena’s chest. The gloves are still on, cool silk rippling against her skin, but the effect is as potent as if it were her bare palm. Zelena can’t remember the last time she was touched with warmth instead of violence, the last time a hand meant comfort instead of punishment. She gasps a little, then shivers right down to her bones.

“No,” she whispers, drawing back in a panic. “No, that’s not…”

Glinda lets her retreat, but she leaves her hand where it is, a promise hanging like a raindrop on the air.

“You’re with friends now,” she says, like it’s really that simple, like anything could ever be. “You’re with family.”

“There has to be something you’re not telling me,” Zelena manages. She can’t — won’t — believe any of this. “There has to be. You’ve seen me. You saw what I was like before…”

“Before you changed? Before you chose good over wickedness, forgiveness over resentment?”

Slowly, like she’s underwater, Glinda pulls off her glove. Zelena is so afraid, but she can’t seem to move, and this time when Glinda moves in to touch her face she doesn’t resist at all.

“Oh…” she whispers, though she has no idea why.

“You did this to yourself,” Glinda says. “You left your past behind you and chose a future with us. No-one made you do that, you chose it all on your own.” Her smile is so beautiful, so radiant; is it really all for her? “You’ve given me a thousand reasons to believe in you, and not a single one to doubt you. Why in the world would I start now?”

Her palm is warm, her thumb so very soft as she catches the corner of Zelena’s lips, and _oh_ , Zelena has never felt so helpless.

“Because I’m _wicked_ ,” she says.

Glinda’s smile softens until it’s as tender as her touch. “You don’t look wicked to me.”

“Why?” She scoffs, forcing derision because it stings less than doubt. “Because my skin isn’t green any more? Because I look like the rest of you?”

She’s still not used to that part. A little peace of mind, a moment or two spent looking forwards instead of backwards, turning her back on Regina and all the pain she represents… is it really that easy to change who and what she is? She remembers the look on Glinda’s face when the green drained out of her, the joy and the pride and… and _this_ , the same tender thing she sees on her face now, the warmth so powerful it hums like magic in the places where they’re touching. It makes her tremble, sets her heart racing; she’s never seen that look before, not on anyone.

“It’s not about the colour of your skin,” Glinda says. “It’s about the colour of your soul.”

Zelena shakes her head. It’s not the only part of her that’s shaking.

“I don’t understand,” she whispers. “These things you think you see…”

She doesn’t finish. She’s not sure she can. _They don’t exist, they’re not real. It’s an illusion, a glamour, a trick._ She wants to say it all, wants to spill her fears out onto the air, wants to make sure that Glinda knows she’s falling for a lie. But she can’t, she won’t, she couldn’t bear to see the light go out on her face, couldn’t bear to see the faith bleed out of her. She can’t watch someone else give up and turn their back on her.

It’s intoxicating, the way Glinda looks at her, the quiet, breathless faith, the press of her hand against the lines of her face. Zelena’s skin feels like a desert under her palm, desperately thirsty for something it’s never known. She can’t part with it now; if loses it she’s sure she’ll die.

“It’s you who doesn’t see,” Glinda is saying, her voice so sweet and so low. “It’s not wickedness, this thing you have inside of you. It’s just that you don’t understand it. And how could you? You were never taught.”

“I was taught,” Zelena says, defensive in spite of herself. “I was taught by the most powerful—”

“Magic is about more than power.” There’s sorrow in her eyes; it stifles the sparkle, the beauty, and makes Zelena’s heart feel like it’s been doused with cold water. “If you stay with us, if you let us guide you, you will discover that for yourself. There is so much more we can teach you.”

“Like what?”

It’s a stupid question. She can feel the answer in Glinda’s fingertips, the nails drumming along her hairline, the prints marking her temples, the heat of her palm, the thumb resting against her mouth. Every point of contact whispers to places she never even knew she had, echoes in the secret chambers of her heart . Promises, offers, invitations. _Let me show you._

“Wisdom,” Glinda says, speaking for her sisters. “And courage.”

But that’s not what Zelena sees in her eyes. It’s not what she senses in the press of her palm, her nails, her thumb. It’s not what she _feels_ , the strange new magic rising like a sob in her chest.

“Wisdom,” she echoes. The world seems to shift under her feet.

“And courage,” Glinda says again.

Zelena swallows. “And…”

Glinda’s smile is radiant, impossible, and suddenly so very close.

“…and _love_.”

*

In the morning, Zelena feels like she’s glowing.

Not green, not literally, not like she’s used to. It’s not the wickedness in her this time, radiating out of her pores for everyone to see. It’s not envy or resentment or spite, not the hurt and the hate that she’s nursed her whole life, the only emotions she ever really knew how to show. It’s something entirely new, a wonderful sort of feeling that she couldn’t keep inside even if she tried.

Glinda takes her hand, right there in front of the other two. It’s like an act of defiance, of pride, and Zelena feels a very different colour flooding her face.

“Come,” Glinda says. She’s glowing as well, but then she always seems to be. She is so impossibly beautiful. “I think it’s time you saw for yourself the land we’ve placed under your protection.”

She means the West. Zelena’s heart flutters, excited and fearful at the same time. “I’d like that,” she says in a whisper.

Of course, they don’t make it. The world, as always, has other ideas.

They’ve barely been walking an hour when it happens, not quite hand-in-hand but close enough that Zelena feels light and dizzy; the world could burn to ash all around them and she’s sure she wouldn’t even care.

She’s trying to watch the road, to find that place on the horizon that is, or will soon be, her domain. A kingdom all her own, and one that her sister won’t ever be able to take away! She’s distracted, swimming in her own happiness — such a strange feeling, she’s never known anything quite like it — and so she doesn’t immediately recognise that something is wrong.

Glinda does, though. She’s so in tune with everything, so aware; she senses it in the blink of an eye. Her body gets suddenly stiff, tense and uneasy at Zelena’s side, but it’s only when she stops talking that Zelena glances up and catches the stricken look on her face.

“What is it?” she asked, feeling panicky now as well. “Is something wrong?”

Glinda shakes her head, but the haunted look doesn’t go away.

“We should head back,” she says. Her voice is sharp; it leaves no room for debate. “We can visit the West another time.”

Zelena frowns. “I don’t understand. I thought you wanted—”

But then she notices, and the words die gasping in her throat.

At first it’s just shouting, two voices raised high and loud in what sounds like an argument. For a blessedly oblivious moment she’s not sure what the trouble is, why it has Glinda all worked up. People argue all the time, don’t they? But then her senses hone in a little more, focused like they get when she’s summoning her magic, and then she can’t unhear it, can’t unrecognise what she knows is the terrible, horrible truth. It’s shouting, yes, but it’s not an argument. It’s something else, something she knows far too well.

There might be two voices involved, but only one of them carries any strength. The other is weak and woefully small, and the only words it seems able to say are _“no”_ and _“stop”_ and—

—and then Zelena is saying them too, the same words wrung out of her by memory, the long-faded marks shaping them and making them bitter, making them real and true and so, so present.

She knows this story. She lived it, her childhood and early adulthood beaten and bloodied and bruised until there was nothing left of it. A soul in pain, another inflicting it, and the first is utterly helpless. A fist, probably, or maybe a switch, but what difference does it make, the what and the how and the why, when she knows exactly how it’s going to end?

“No,” she whispers, the word coming from a deep, broken place in her. “No, no, not again. Not…”

“Zelena.” Glinda’s voice is much too high. “Zelena we need to go back.”

“No.” Her voice shakes. Her fist is hot with fire, with magic, with the power she was never brave enough to summon when it mattered. “ _No_! This won’t happen again. I won’t let it. I won’t!”

Glinda tries to hold her back, keep her calm. “Zelena, we can’t—”

But Zelena isn’t listening. She’s running.

She knows what she’ll see before she gets there, of course, but that doesn’t stop the sight slamming into her like a blow.

Blessedly, it’s a boy. Not a girl, not a _daughter_. She’s not sure she could remain standing if it was, if the scene was too much a mirror of her own experience. A boy makes it easier, somehow, makes it just a fraction less personal. He’s young, a skinny weedy little slip of a thing with a bruise blooming across his face; the mark says far more than any of the words he’s shouting, or at least it speaks in a language Zelena knows.

It’s no less of a nightmare, no less sickening, but at least she feels a little distance when it’s not a little girl’s voice. At least she has room enough to breathe, to think, to remember what’s right. She doesn’t need Glinda’s voice in her ear telling her what good witches do. She doesn’t care that this isn’t the West, that they’re not even there yet. Wherever they are, _protect_ means _protect_.

“Stop!”

Her voice crackles with power, more power than she’s ever felt before, but for once she doesn’t care. Glinda was right: there is more to magic than power, and Zelena doesn’t care right now how powerful she sounds or how powerful she is. The only thing she cares about, the only thing that matters is what she has to do. Her hand is already up, fire dancing between her fingers, and her focus is hotter even than the flame. She’s blind with rage, with hatred, with all those bottled-up things she never got to do before she left home.

The father — tall, strong, broad shoulders, younger than hers was — spins to face her. He’s still gripping his son’s shirt in his fist, but at least the other one is away from his face now. Let him come at her instead, if he likes; she’s grown now, and she can take it.

“Who the hell are you?” he asks, and she actually laughs because he has no idea, _no idea_ , just how much trouble he’s in.

“Touch him again,” she warns, “and I swear you will burn alive.”

“Zelena!” Glinda is behind her now, one hand on her shoulder, the other at her wrist, trying to pull her arm down. “Zelena, this isn’t how we do things.”

“I don’t care.” There are tears in her eyes, so hot that they feed the fire in her hands. Glinda flinches and lets go, scalded. “I don’t care how _you_ do things.”

“Zelena…”

But Zelena has no interest in hearing her out now. She can’t tear her eyes off the boy or his father, the hurt in one pair of eyes and the hate in the other. How many times has she seen both of those things? How many times has she held her hand steady, watching the marks on her face disappear behind a glamour or a healing spell? How many times has she seen the violence flash behind her father’s eyes, the spite and the cruelty, the deadly aim as he calls her _wicked_ and brings up the switch?

Her eyes burn, stinging from the tears she won’t let fall. She holds them back by pure force of will, uses them to fuel her magic. She won’t cry, not here and not yet. She can cry later, when it’s just her and Glinda again, when they’ve talked it through and Zelena has made her understand. For now she needs to be angry, only angry; she needs to channel the lessons she learned, not from her new sisters but from Rumpelstiltskin and from her father. Love won’t work here; it can only be anger. She needs to be as violent as he was.

“Step away from him,” she says, a command that cracks like a lash. He hesitates for just a second, fingers tightening around his son’s shirt, and that’s all the invitation she needs. “ _Now_.”

Glinda sighs, deep and very sad. “I think you’d best do as she says.”

Zelena doesn’t tell her that it doesn’t matter any more, that she won’t be stopped now. She keeps that part to herself. No-one needs to know what’s going on in her head; it’s private and personal and it’s all her own. Even good witches have those things, don’t they? Even the very best ones have dark places inside them, secrets that no-one else can ever know about.

The old man obeys. Not her, she can tell, but Glinda. Her face isn’t well known without its green glimmer; he’s already made it clear that he has no idea who she is. Well, Zelena doesn’t care about that. She isn’t here for notoriety, she’s here to make sure that this boy doesn’t suffer the way she did, that he will not go through his life feeling unwanted and unloved and unworthy.

Let the old bastard follow Glinda if he likes. Let him assume she’s the one in charge; let him think her good magic will save and protect him. Let Glinda think that too, if it’ll make the next moments easier; Zelena knows it won’t change anything. She can feel the fire in her belly now as well as her hand, and she can see the hope spark to life in the boy’s eyes. It’s probably the first time he’s ever felt such a thing.

“Look away,” she tells him, voice softening with clumsy compassion.

She feels Glinda flinch behind her. She understands now. “Zelena!”

“You too,” Zelena says, “if you’re too squeamish to see justice done.”

“This isn’t justice, Zelena!” Glinda’s voice breaks. “This is something you can’t undo.”

“I wasn’t planning on undoing it.” Hers doesn’t. She’s very proud of that, of her tongue and her hand for staying steady, of her throat for not giving away the old wounds, the horrible memories that tighten and squeeze like a noose. “But kudos to you for always looking on the bright side.”

“Zelena, _please_ …”

“No.” She raises her hand, the fireball blazing from red to green; at this distance, he’ll be dead before he even feels it. It’s a mercy he doesn’t deserve. “You don’t understand. You can’t.”

“I do,” Glinda whispers. For the first time, she sounds like the broken one. “I don’t need to feel your pain to know where it comes from. But I’ve told you before: you can’t change what’s already happened. Killing this man won’t undo what was done to you. You can’t change your past.”

“I’m not trying to change my past,” Zelena says. She looks at the boy, sees the fire reflected in his eyes, turning them a different colour. “I’m changing his future.”

She closes her eyes, blocks out Glinda’s cries, and lets the fireball go.

*

Of course, that’s the end of their little trip to the West.

“We’ll go another time,” Glinda says, but she’s shaking all over and her voice sounds terribly strange.

Zelena shrugs and pretends she doesn’t care. Honestly, she halfway expects to be kicked out of the sisterhood as soon as they get back to the Heart of Oz. She wouldn’t mind, really — better to do what she did than sit quietly at some fancy bloody table and pretend not to see it — only she can’t bear the idea of watching Glinda’s face lose its radiance. The other two can think or do what they want, they never trusted her anyway, but _Glinda_ …

That will hurt. She doesn’t want it to, but experience has taught her that it will anyway.

She cries a little as they walk. Not over Glinda, not over anything in particular, just because she’s feeling too raw and too vulnerable and too small not to. She hasn’t felt so young in such a very long time, and it hurts as deeply now as it did when she was the one with bruises on her face. She tries to keep it hidden, to mask it with magic, but her powers are drained and useless and she is every bit as exposed as she feels. Between throwing fireballs and mending the poor boy’s wounds, there’s nothing left for a glamour to shroud her tears.

Glinda sees everything, of course. She doesn’t say that she’s disappointed, though, and she doesn’t tell Zelena that she’s wicked, that she’s a murderer now and a monster. She just sighs and says, “I’m sorry.”

Zelena doesn’t have the heart to tell her she’s not.

Back at the Heart of Oz, she’s sent to Glinda’s chambers while the rest of them sit down to discuss her. It’s adorably naïve of them to assume she’ll be a good girl and wait when they’ve put her in a room with a dozen mirrors just ripe for the enchanting; maybe the two idiots have more faith in her than she first thought.

She waits just long enough for her strength to come back, for the magic to reignite in her chest, then she leans back on Glinda’s feather-white bed, waves a hand, and eavesdrops.

_“…not talking about a little misdemeanour.”_

That’s the know-it-all Witch of the North. Zelena bares her teeth, knowing already that her sister from the East will side with her. Well, what do they know? They weren’t even there.

 _“Murder,”_ the Witch of the East says, making her position official. _“Cold-blooded murder. There’s no way around it.”_

 _“It’s a sizeable slip, I know,”_ Glinda sighs. _“But still, I believe—”_

 _“We know you do.”_ They’re all sighing now, all three of them. If they weren’t holding her future in their hands it might almost be funny. _“That’s the problem, Glinda. You put so much faith in people, even when they don’t deserve it.”_

_“True as that may be—”_

_“Glinda.”_ The name comes out sharp, almost dangerous; it’s a jagged contrast to the East’s usual calm. It makes Zelena want to throw a fireball at her as well. _“We all want to believe that she’s the one we’ve been waiting for. But after what happened today, I think it’s quite clear that she—”_

_“No. You’re wrong.”_

_“The prophecy—”_

_“—isn’t set in stone!”_

_“Glinda.”_ It sounds different this time, less sharp but somehow more deadly. Zelena doesn’t know what it means, but it slides like a blade between her ribs. _“Is there not the least possibility that you’re letting your feelings override your common sense?”_

 _“My feelings?”_ She sounds so upset, so bloody offended, like it’s the worst accusation in the world. Zelena can’t believe how much that hurts. _“You think I—?”_

_“You deny it?”_

Glinda is silent for a very, very long time. Zelena tries to make out her face through the swirling mist of the enchanted mirror, searches and searches for some shadow of emotion, but there’s too much fog, the image isn’t clear enough and why, _why_ isn’t she better at this? The only thing she can see are her eyes, bright and beautiful like always. A woman could drown in those eyes; last night, Zelena’s certain that she did.

Now, though? Now, her eyes are dim and hazy, and the silence seems to go on for a lifetime. Zelena can’t remember the last time she felt so desperate, so completely adrift.

At long last, Glinda shakes her head. _“No,”_ she whispers, defeated and weathered, like a fallen soldier. _“No, I don’t deny it.”_

Zelena almost sobs. The only thing that stops her is the need to keep listening, to know where she stands among her new sisters, the ‘family’ that welcomed her so readily such a short time ago.

 _“Your judgement is clouded, Glinda,”_ says the Witch of the North.

The Witch of the East agrees. _“Zelena’s road can only lead in one direction.”_

 _“You don’t know that for certain.”_ Glinda’s almost pleading now. _“No-one can know with absolute certainty what the prophecies truly mean. The Book of Records is elusive at best, deceptive at worst. For all we know—”_

 _“For heaven’s sake, Glinda.”_ It’s a warning, stiff and sharp. _“Think with your head.”_

 _“I don’t know that I can,”_ Glinda admits, a confession that leaves her visibly wrecked. _“She has my—”_

Zelena waves a hand, cutting off the connection with a choked cry.

“No,” she whispers, and she doesn’t know who she’s talking to. She only knows that her heart feels like it’s about to burst right out of her chest, that she can’t think or breathe, that the magic is threatening to spill over and swallow her and everything she holds dear. “No, no, no. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t, she can’t, she doesn’t _see_ …”

She’s sobbing when the door flies open a little while later, and she doesn’t care that she’s giving herself away, that Glinda must know that she’s been spying on her, on them, on her own fate. She doesn’t care about that, doesn’t want to care about anything at all; she just wants Glinda’s arms around her, Glinda’s skin against her skin. She just wants Glinda to sit down and hold her and tell her—

“—it’s all right.”

Zelena shakes her head. She wants to believe it, wants more than anything to see the pretty, innocent thing that Glinda sees in her, but she knows that it’s not there. It doesn’t exist; maybe it never really did.

“You’re wrong,” she says, almost choking on the bitter green truth. “They’re right.”

“You don’t know that any more than they do,” Glinda says, gentle, always so gentle.

“Neither do you.”

Glinda sighs softly, a twinkling, crystalline sort of sound; in Zelena’s head it sounds like something shattering. A chandelier or a water glass, or maybe a pair of hearts.

“No,” Glinda says after a moment. “I don’t know. But I believe.”

“Do you?” Zelena whispers. She wants so badly to believe as well, but no-one ever taught her how. “Do you really?”

Glinda holds her close and tight. Her gloves, cool white silk, slide effortlessly over Zelena’s clothing, then under, finding the hard lines of her shoulders, the dip of her neckline, the sweep of her collarbones, the plunging space between her breasts. The sensation is almost familiar now, but it’s too much, too strong, and it makes her tremble. In Glinda’s arms Zelena feels more powerful than any witch or wizard in Oz; the magic, intangible but oh so real, draws the thoughts out of her mind and leaves her drowning.

“I do,” Glinda says. “With all my heart, I do.”

Her body tells a different story, though, and one she can’t hide any more than Zelena can silence the pain and the grief and the years that have broken her and taken her and made her what she is.

There’s no crystal in Glinda’s laughter now, and her touches don’t linger the way they did last time. They’re vague and vacant, hollow in a way that fills up more space than it should, and Zelena might be naïve, might even be innocent in the way that bloody chair demands, but she’s not stupid, she knows what it means. The points of contact don’t sing now the way they did before, and when Glinda touches her, skin on skin, it’s as though she’s still wearing her gloves.

Her smile has lost its softness now; it’s sad and strained. Her eyes, those beautiful eyes, are dull and dead and almost cold; there’s nothing left of their sparkle, their shine. Zelena looks deep into her face, searches desperately for the love, the warmth, the faith that came so easily just last night, but it’s gone, vanished just like that poor boy’s father, scorched and seared and burned to ashes in a scream and a sob.

Zelena knows what that means. She can pretend she doesn’t see it, pretend it’s not real, pretend it’s just the moment, but the truth is there and she can’t hide from it forever. Just like the North and the East, she can see her own future reflected in Glinda’s eyes, and there’s no mistaking it or ignoring it now. She’s too close, _they_ are too close, and it’s not possible to hide something so powerful from someone who has shared so much in every possible way.

Glinda is trying so hard, Zelena can tell, but even she can’t pluck a miracle from the air, even she can’t make a world appear from nothing. Her eyes are so empty and her smile is so sad, and all it takes is a look, a touch, a breath, and it’s there, it’s right there, painful and inescapable and _no, please, not you too…_

But there it is, as clear as the taint on her own sallow skin.

Glinda, for all her love and all her faith, has begun to doubt.

***


	4. Chapter 4

***

Storybrooke.

It’s a quaint little town, or at least it puts on the face of one. Zelena appreciates that — her father’s influence is never quite silent, even after all this time — but there’s something discomfiting, almost eerie about the place, like the people here are missing more than just their memories.

The sense of unease is pervasive and potent, worry and nervousness passing like infection between the town’s inhabitants, only no-one is truly scared. No, they have too much faith for that, too much bloody pride. They stare up at Emma Swan, their precious Saviour, like she’s some kind of goddess among mortals, like they really believe she can save them from anything.

Well, no, she can’t. Not if Zelena has her way. She’s long past the point where pretty blondes can steer her away from what she wants.

It’s a funny thing, being hidden in plain sight. She’s never had that luxury before. From her earliest moments she was always so present, so excruciatingly visible; no matter how hard she tried not to be seen or noticed there was always a finger pointing straight at her, a voice next to her ear saying _‘you’re wicked’_ or _‘you’re worthless’_ or _‘there’s something wrong with you’_. Next to all that spite and cruelty and resentment, it’s a kind of blessing to be invisible, to have her true self locked away. Better to not exist at all than to be feared and despised everywhere she turns.

No-one despises her here. No-one judges her or resents her, no-one sees the green seething beneath her skin; no-one sees her for who she really is. Hell, most people here don’t even see her at all. They’re so used to strangers coming and going from every corner of the world — this one and every other, it seems — that they don’t even recognise what’s right in front of their faces. They’re all so sure they’d know a threat if one presented itself that they can’t read between the lines of what’s there, can’t see a performance for what it is. Zelena never thought she had much talent for acting, but apparently she’s good enough to fool the idiots here.

It doesn’t hurt, she supposes, that this land is very different to the last few she passed through. The differences between Oz and the Enchanted Forest were mostly aesthetic, but this place is strange in every way imaginable. There are things here that she can’t even begin to comprehend, things that no-one else seems to even notice at all. They call it a land without magic, but she’s sure that’s wrong because magic seems to be in everything. No-one calls it by that name, of course, and no-one seems to think twice about it, but that doesn’t make it any less mystical or any less impossible.

“Electricity,” Snow White explains with the tireless, characteristic patience that makes Zelena want to stab her with something sharp.

Magic isn’t the only thing that’s different here; apparently Snow White isn’t Snow White either. She calls herself Mary Margaret, and doesn’t bother to say why.

It’s a pointless charade, so far as Zelena can tell. Storybrooke is hidden away from the rest of the world; there’s no reason for its idiotic inhabitants to pretend they’re anything more or less than what they really are. Everyone knows that Snow White is Snow White. Does she expect to fool these people into thinking she’s a different person just by wearing different clothes?

Zelena’s doing that too, of course, pretending to be somebody she’s not, but at least she has a good reason for the deception. And at least she keeps her own bloody name.

She’s done some reading since she got here. Midwifery, babies, anxious expectant mothers, all that nonsense. It’s not nearly so interesting as finding out how this ‘electricity’ business works, but her ultimate goal is right there on the horizon and it helps to keep her focused. She’s not here to make a home in this ridiculous new land; she’s just using it as a way-station to what she really wants: a do-over on her pathetic excuse for a life.

It doesn’t take much to convince the idealistic Snow White — _Mary Margaret_ , whichever — that she only wants to help. A few well-timed pieces of advice, and the woman is already eating out of her hand. She doesn’t remember Zelena from all those years ago, of course; in the exciting life of a princess, who would remember one of an endless stream of visitors passing through her kingdom? She believes everything Zelena tells her now, wide-eyed and just as foolish as she was way back then, and she naturally leaps at the opportunity to offer some help in return.

“It’s called a toaster,” she says, pointing out one of the countless infernal contraptions in her kitchen. “It warms bread.”

Zelena can’t help herself. Feigning awe, she says, “Like magic?”

Mary Margaret laughs. “Not exactly. Anyone can use it. See?”

It’s hard to hold her powers in check, to play the confused little newcomer who doesn’t know how to do anything. It’s hard to look at Mary Margaret and not see the self-satisfied child from the Enchanted Forest, the one who was sure she knew all the world’s secrets at barely ten years old. She’s still a smug little know-it-all, even after all these years, but at least she has the benefit of having actually gone through puberty this time.

She’s very proud of her toasted bread. Unfathomably so, to be quite honest. No doubt she’s happy to have a little gift of her own to offer in return for the fake midwifery, but in all her life across three separate worlds Zelena has never seen anyone take such joy in something so absurdly simple. It’s all she can do not to ask _‘are you sure you’re not new here too?’_ and it’s one of the greatest challenges of her life, pretending to be awed by poorly-cooked breakfast foods.

“You’re a marvel,” she says.

Naturally, that makes Mary Margaret glow. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she says, all blushes and false modesty. Zelena doesn’t need to be familiar with royalty to know that she’s lapping this up. “Honestly, I was feeling completely out of my depth before you came along. Waking up one morning to find yourself nine months pregnant… well, it doesn’t leave much time to prepare, does it?”

Zelena forces a smile. “Now, don’t you worry. We’ll take care of all that.”

Rather unsurprisingly, Mary Margaret talks a lot. She talks about life in Storybrooke, about the missing year, about anything and everything she can think of, and she never pauses for breath. She talks with the reckless abandon of someone who can’t fathom an audience not hanging on her every word, and it only takes the lightest touch of flattery to get her to spill the details on every little moment in her arrogant, overblown life. It’s almost too easy, really.

“At least this isn’t your first,” Zelena says, gesturing at the baby bump. “You gave birth to the Saviour, for heaven’s sake. I’d say you’re practically an expert.”

Mary Margaret’s expression grows cloudy with regret. “It was a… mixed blessing.”

“I can imagine.” There’s acid in her stomach, fire in her blood, but she keeps the smile on by sheer force of will. She’s come too far to let it slip now. “Abandoning your baby like that…”

Mary Margaret shifts uncomfortably. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘abandon’.” It’s clear from the look on her face, though, that she’s spent a long time thinking about this, and it doesn’t take someone as intimately acquainted with abandonment as Zelena to know that that’s exactly the word she would use. “I mean, it’s not like I just dumped her in a basket and left her all alone in the forest or something…”

Zelena’s fingers twitch, so sharply that she has to hide her hands under the table or risk giving herself away. Already, her control is hanging by a thread.

“Of course not,” she says, but she can’t sustain the smile; it twitches just like her fingers, then dissolves.

“It wasn’t easy.” To her credit, she looks like she actually means that, not that it lessens the sting any. “I can’t imagine any mother would do something like that by choice. Goodness, what a tragedy.”

“Yes,” Zelena says softly. Her chest and her stomach are seizing; she wants to scream. “It is, rather, isn’t it?”

Mary Margaret opens her mouth, then shuts it again. There’s an odd look on her face, the conflict of someone who loves talking about themselves but is slowly, oh so slowly, coming to realise that they’re not the only person in the conversation. Snow White doesn’t know anything about Zelena’s experiences of, of course, but still she feels just like she did all those years ago in the Enchanted Forest, someone older and supposedly wiser held in thrall by a young spoiled brat of a princess.

After a beat or two Mary Margaret clears her throat. “I’m sorry,” she says, frowning. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Of course.” The lie comes easier now than it did all those years ago, but still the denial almost chokes her. She flounders for the smile, elusive and excruciating. _Put on a good face,_ she chides herself, and remembers how to breathe, how to speak, how to deceive. “It’s just… well, you know, I’ve seen so many expectant young mothers. It’s painful to even imagine such a thing.”

“It’s more painful to have to do it,” Mary Margaret says softly. Her voice breaks, hands shaking where they rest against her pregnant belly. “Trust me. No mother wants to go through that.”

 _Mine did,_ Zelena thinks. Her vision grows dim, blurring at the edges; for a moment all she can see is the crackle of magic. _She threw me away like I was nothing, and never wasted another thought on me the rest of her life._

All of a sudden she feels dizzy, light-headed from holding her temper and her magic in check. It’s been a long time since she had to do that, since she had more than her monkeys and the caged Dark One for company, since she had any reason to care who saw her lose control. There’s never any need to put on airs and graces for them, but the dear princess is different. She still needs coddling and coercing, still needs to believe that Zelena is just a cheery midwife, and that means she really does need to keep her insides on the inside.

Whatever idiotic name she goes by in this world, not even Snow White could miss a fireball in her kitchen. She would recognise the threat in a heartbeat, figure it all out, and then everything would be ruined.

Zelena lurches up to her feet. Her fingertips are sparking, electricity like the stuff that cooked the bread, and her skin is so hot she’s worried she’ll burn holes in her clothing. She can’t stay here, can’t keep listening to this privileged little brat blather on about how heartbreaking it is to abandon a child, how much of a nightmare it is for the bloody mother. If she hears one more word about it, if she thinks about it for even just a second, her magic will devour this place and everything in it.

“I should go,” she says, in what is probably the understatement of the century. “I’m sure you’ve got all sorts of things to do, and here I am taking up all your time on idle chit-chat and…” She hesitates, fumbling for the word through the fog of memory. “…toasters?”

Mary Margaret smiles. If she senses there’s something wrong she gives no hint of it. No surprise there; from Zelena’s experience, princesses — much like queens — don’t notice anything that’s not shoved straight under their noses.

“It’s been a pleasure, really,” she’s saying. Heaven help the poor woman, she seems to genuinely mean it. “It was nice to spend a few minutes talking about something other than panic and paranoia.”

Zelena holds the smile, holds it, holds it, holds it until she’s sure it will kill her. “Well, that’s what I’m here for,” she says. “To make your life easier, and to take away as much of that paranoia as I can.” It’s so cloying it physically hurts. Or maybe that’s just the fire forming in her fist. “Look, I’d love to have a sit-down with you and your husband one of these days. Meet the family, you know?”

If Mary Margaret beams any brighter, she’ll put the lights out of a job. “That would be wonderful,” she gushes.

 _Good,_ Zelena thinks, still holding back the bitterness. _Then this excruciating little trip down Memory Lane isn’t a total loss._

She keeps her mouth shut, though. She doesn’t trust herself to open it without spewing all the vitriol that’s gathering at the back of her throat. The longer she plays this stupid game, the more she finds herself relishing the pleasant side-effect of destroying Snow White’s happiness as well as Regina’s. The two of them are so sickeningly intertwined, it seems only fair to break both of them at the same time.

“Well, then,” she says, “you let me know the best time for you, and I’ll fit in around it.”

If it sounds vague, it’s meant to be. She doesn’t care one way or another what’s going on in the Charming-White family timetable, she just wants an excuse to throw the ball into Mary Margaret’s court and get the hell out of there.

It works well enough. Mary Margaret would believe anything as long as she was the focal point.

“You’re a godsend,” she says.

Finally, Zelena’s smile comes a little easier.

“Oh, you have no idea.”

*

Back at her farmhouse, she destroys every piece of furniture she can find.

She puts it back together again, of course — she’s not a total savage, after all, and she does still have to live here — but for a blessed few minutes there’s nothing but the sound of searing, scorching, and screaming. One of the great many benefits of living a good distance away from town: she can make as much noise as she likes, and to hell with what the neighbours think.

It’s funny, how little she cares now when she loses control. When she was younger, swallowed by the shadows of men who wanted her obedient and docile, she was so quick to apologise for the smallest lapse. A loss of control was a sort of failure; it meant a beating from her father or disapproval from Rumple, and who could say which of the two was worse? Now, at home as she is with her gift and herself, she knows better: losing control isn’t weakness, it’s a show of power.

She doesn’t feel any better afterwards, though. Burning the place to almost-ashes should work as a kind of catharsis, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. Not when she can just wave a hand and undo all the damage as though it never happened. It feels cheap, sordid and stupid, and she resents it all the more because nothing else in her life has ever been so easily reversed or erased. She might be inching closer to the ingredients she needs, but until they’re hers she’s stuck here in this town, this land, this blasted existence.

It’s a nice fantasy, imagining that she can burn out the bitterness as easily as she can burn down a room or a home, but experience has taught her that reality is seldom so simple. Mary Margaret’s blithe carelessness, the look on her face when she said _“no mother wants to go through that”_ , they scratch at the place inside her that never quite healed. She can’t put it back to sleep now that it’s awake; trying is like spitting in the rain.

When there’s nothing more to do, when her magic is depleted and she’s breathless and exhausted, she gives up and storms out of the house.

It’s safer, she’s learned, to be angry in public when she knows it won’t spill over into magic, when she knows that losing her temper just means shouting or swearing. She can’t risk letting her magic show, not while the idiots of Storybrooke don’t know who she is, and control has always been her biggest weakness. She doesn’t want to blow her cover just yet, and a stray fireball would give her away just as surely as if she was caught talking to her monkeys in public.

So she exhausts herself in private, burns out her magic until she can barely even stand, keeps it locked up tight like the dirty little secret it was when she was young, before she had any idea that her mother threw her away, back when she believed that the man who drank himself to sickness and violence really was her father.

She hates the secrecy. It makes her feel small and helpless again, not powerful like she knows she is but frightened and angry and lost like she used to be, full to bursting with more emotions than she knows what to do with. Is it any wonder, after a childhood like that, that her magic overflows at the least provocation? Is it any wonder that she loses control now when every breath she took back then was another reason to be yelled at or beaten or told that she was wicked? She knows that it’s different now, that she’s here on her own terms, but still the memory has a sharp point, and it breaks the skin at the most inopportune moments.

Restless and aching all over, she goes down to the docks. It’s usually quiet there, and she often finds that the sight of so much water is calming.

Water, of course, makes her think of Dorothy, makes her remember the look on the stupid girl’s face when she thought she’d got the better of her. As if the ‘greatest evil the realm has ever seen’ could be drowned in a bucket! Such a silly girl, Dorothy; it’s admirable that she refused to give up, of course, but still she’s hardly appropriate nemesis material. Thoughts of her are best left with everything else from Oz: in the past, the one that won’t exist once she’s done here. It’s a comforting thought, the end of everything that ever hurt her, and she lets it take hold, lulling her in rhythm with the waves rocking the small boats, the ripples brushing the horizon. _Water_ , it always seems to flow off her skin.

She’s been standing there a while, breathing in the smell of salt, when she realises she’s not alone.

“Who the hell are you?”

The voice is unfamiliar and unnecessarilycrude, but there’s no mistaking the face when she turns to look. _Like mother, like daughter_ , as the old saying goes, and Emma Swan is the spitting image of Snow White.

“It’s uncanny,” Zelena says out loud. It makes Emma bristle, of course, not least of all because she didn’t answer her question, and Zelena relishes the look on her face. “Oh, I’m so sorry. We haven’t met. I’m… well, I’m a friend of your mother’s.”

Emma narrows her eyes. She doesn’t believe her, that much is clear, but she has no real reason to doubt her either. It’s true enough to pass her scrutiny, at any rate, and Zelena happily bides her time until the so-called Saviour draws her own conclusions.

“A friend?” she echoes after a moment.

“Well, sort of.” _Play it cool,_ she tells herself. She’s heard things about the Saviour that make her leery of pushing her too far. “We’ve only just met. She’s helping me figure out some of the nuances of this world, and I’m helping her with the baby.”

Well, it’s close enough to the truth, isn’t it? Emma doesn’t need to know that it’s a touch more complicated than that, or that Zelena has more in mind for Snow White and her unborn child than Lamaze classes and breathing techniques. A lifetime of being mistrusted and despised has taught her to keep her cards close to her chest when some imbecile takes it upon themselves to size her up, and she uses that experience to her benefit now.

Emma frowns a little, then shrugs, seeming to sense the surface truth if not the deeper ones behind it. “Right. Dropped in with the latest curse, did you?”

“Something like that,” Zelena says. She doesn’t smile as much for Emma as she does for Mary Margaret; somehow the daughter seems more receptive to sobriety than saccharine. Well, good for her. “It’s all still a bit disconcerting, to be quite honest. But Mary Margaret is lovely. And, well, if I can use my gifts to help bring her baby into the world, so much the better, eh?”

“If you say so.”

Not a big talker, this one. Apparently there’s more of a difference between mother and daughter than she first thought.

Looking at her a little closer, the differences are there on her face too, shining subtly between the lines. Hers is a perfect duplicate of Snow White’s, round and warm and full of what might be mistaken as love, but the softness is subdued on her in a way it never is on Snow or Mary Margaret or whatever the hell she calls herself in this world.

Emma has scars, the same kind Zelena has, the hard and heavy kind that can only come from a difficult life, a life of struggles and self-doubt and physical pain; they’re carefully hidden, seething beneath the skin, but Zelena sees them as clearly as Oz saw the envy on hers. Without a doubt, Emma Swan was not raised the perfect privileged princess her mother was.

It’s a strange thing, the feeling that swells in her. Empathy, maybe? No, that can’t be right. It’s been years since she felt that for another living thing.

Still, it hurts. There’s just enough of her own mnemonic pain, the sorrow and the suffering still simmering inside of her, that it’s sharp and serrated when it hits the surface and clashes with Emma. She imagines it as a visceral thing, a jagged mark carving its path across both their faces. White as snow, but with just a flicker of green to make it familiar. She knows the things she sees behind Emma Swan’s eyes, the shadows beneath her skin; she knows them so well, the parts of this lost little Saviour that will never feel at ease no matter how hard the world tries to win her over. It’s all so very familiar.

“You really do look just like her,” she says, testing the waters for them both.

Emma’s eyes flash, keen but not really threatening. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry.” She isn’t. Not even a little bit. “I don’t mean to be rude, but… well, there’s no mistaking whose daughter you are.”

“I think that’s pushing it,” Emma says, a little sharply. She’s gruff, decisive. Zelena can tell already that she’s the type who doesn’t waste her words. She won’t say anything she doesn’t think is worth hearing. “We’re not really very similar.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She smiles just slightly, just enough to unbalance her but not enough to put her on guard. “You have her warmth, her compassion. I can tell.”

“You can tell that from five seconds?” The Saviour isn’t much better at pretending to be impressed than Zelena is. In Emma’s case, however, it seems to be deliberate; she’s pushing her, trying to gauge her responses. Clever girl, if a little too nosy for her own good. “If you’re that good at reading people, maybe you should try my job.”

“Oh, no. I like my own too well to change.”

Emma quirks a brow. She doesn’t ask the question, but Zelena can tell she’ll be in trouble if she doesn’t answer it anyway.

So she does, spinning the story all over again, the same one she told Mary Margaret. _I’m a midwife, it’s wonderful, so fulfilling bringing little lives into the world_.

Sickening, yes, but at least this time it’s closer to the truth. Sure, so she might have fudged her credentials a little, but it doesn’t count as a lie now that she’s actually been hired, does it? And oh yes, it’s definitely the truth when she says that she’s excited, even thrilled to be helping Snow White with her baby. Who could possibly doubt her when her enthusiasm positively shines?

Besides, it’s not like Emma’s all that interested to begin with. She barely tolerates Zelena’s overblown gushing, and she definitely doesn’t ask questions; she looks almost like she regrets sticking around long enough to hear her out. It’s almost too easy, dancing rings around her.

“It must be a challenge,” Zelena says, when she’s done talking about her nonexistent midwifing skills. “Coming back here only to learn that your mother is pregnant all over again.”

She doesn’t really want to use the phrase _‘latent issues’_ , some psychobabble she picked up from one of those silly midwifing books, but she has a sneaking suspicion it’s appropriate here.

“Not really,” Emma mutters, as sullen and petulant as Zelena herself on a bad day.

“Oh, come now.” She smiles, cool and keen. “Mary Margaret told me all about the first curse. How she had no choice but to aban—”

“She didn’t abandon me.”

Ooh. Latent _something_ , definitely. Zelena shows her teeth. “No, no, of course not. I’d never imply such a dreadful thing.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

Zelena dials back the sweetness just a touch. “I just mean… well, it can’t be easy.”

“It’s not really my business,” Emma says, though she doesn’t sound too convincing. “I’m not my mother’s… well, mother.”

“No.” Zelena takes a deep breath, forces herself to think back to earlier, to Mary Margaret’s kitchen and the kick in her chest as her magic threatened to spill over and give her away. “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant… well, it’s all right if this is a challenge for you as well. Understandable, even. Being cut out of your mother’s life, reuniting just in time to learn that she has another little one on the way, one that she’ll be able to raise properly…” She lets the implication hang on the air, just long enough to really sink in. “Under those circumstances, it’s completely natural to experience some latent—”

“Great,” Emma mutters, cutting her off. “Just what this town needs: another Archie.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Look.” There’s real fire in the Saviour’s eyes now, something just as familiar as the pain under her skin. Zelena wonders if she has trouble with control as well. “I get it. You’re looking out for our family, trying to get all of our ‘issues’ out in the open before the baby comes. It’s a nice gesture. But it’s not gonna happen, okay?”

“I understand,” Zelena says, a little too vapidly.

“No, I don’t think you do.” Apparently light magic is more easily reined in than dark magic; it seems to be the only thing keeping Emma from separating her head from her shoulders right now. “I’ve got plenty of reasons to see a shrink, lady, believe me, but this is not one of them. It took me years to come to terms with my time in the system, but I did it. And I’m not about to let that progress backslide just because my parents are having another kid.” She takes a deep breath, seemingly surprised at herself. “I’m happy for them.”

 _Are you really?_ , Zelena thinks. _Because your face is telling me a very different story._

“Well, good for you,” she says.

But oh, it comes out so very wrong. She means it to be sugary-sweet, saccharine and sickly like everything else she says in this disguise, but that’s not how it sounds at all. It’s rough and sour, an echo of the bitter, rotted taste that’s always in her mouth, and it’s wrong, it’s so terribly wrong. She’s practically perfected the cheery midwife voice by now, but she doesn’t need to see the look on Emma’s face to know that it’s slipped, that she’s given away more of herself than she intended.

A moment ago, Emma was about half a breath away from turning around and storming off. Now, her whole demeanour has changed. She’s staring at Zelena with the same piercing look that Rumple wore sometimes when he was training her, when he made her dive into her emotions and draw out the anger and the hurt. That ended badly for both of them, of course, but Emma can’t be controlled with a dagger and even Zelena’s temper isn’t so volatile that she’d risk setting the Saviour on fire in broad daylight. Still, though, the urge is there, fight or flight, her body seizing with crossed signals.

“Sounds like I’m not the one with mommy issues,” Emma says after a moment. Given the circumstances, Zelena supposes she’s lucky to get off with just a smug look. “That why you became a midwife?”

“I like to help.” The falsehood sticks in her throat, so thick and so cloying that she can’t even try to make it sound sincere. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“It shouldn’t be,” Emma counters, as quick as a whip. “So why don’t I believe you?”

Zelena wets her lips, ponders her next move. She wants to turn around and leave, to make excuses like she did earlier with Mary Margaret; that would be the easiest thing to do, but she doubts it would work so easily a second time. For all her mother’s gullibility, Emma is sharp and she’s scented blood. She won’t be flattered or cajoled into shrugging this off.

Besides, something about the look on her face says this is personal for her as well. Zelena is all too familiar with this particular form of deflection, with twisting the knife into someone else’s weakness to cover up her own. She must have hit a nerve somewhere, or else the Saviour would have just shrugged, laughed, and let the matter drop. Now she’s turning it back, making it all about Zelena, and that means she’s taken a hit.

The trouble, of course, is neither one of them wants to talk about this. They’ve both got the other backed into a corner, and there’s no easy way out for either of them. Zelena might have started out on top, landing the perfect blow at Emma’s weak spot, but she dazed herself in the process, and that was all the Saviour needed to strike back. Neither one of them is going to end this feeling like a winner, but Emma has the upper hand because Zelena still has her cover to protect.

Only one thing for it, then. The truth, or as much of it as she can bear to choke down.

“Where I come from,” she says, allowing a hint of her old self to slip in through the sickening façade, “we don’t have a ‘system’. And we don’t have ‘evil queens’ or ‘curses’ or whatever else to handwave the pain away when a mother abandons her baby in the middle of bloody nowhere.” She closes her eyes for a moment, lets the memory break over her like a wave. “All we have are the marks it leaves behind.”

She never raises her voice, never even drops the midwife’s lilt, but somehow when she’s finished it feels like the aftermath to an explosion. She feels hoarse and shaken, like she’s been screaming to the heavens; she wants to tear Emma Swan limb from limb for making her say it, making her remember, but she can’t because her plans are so much bigger than a moment’s pain.

“Well,” Emma says after a beat or two. “Looks like we have something in common.”

There’s real weight behind the words; Zelena can see how much it takes out of her, how deep a cut it is to acknowledge those things out loud. She knows that it’s a victory, and a valuable one.

So why, then, does it feel like such a terrible defeat?

*

The next time she hears from Mary Margaret, there’s pity in her voice.

The telephone is perhaps the most obnoxious contraption Zelena’s had the misfortune of experiencing — it’s unreliable at best, utterly impossible at worst, and the hiss of static makes her brain itch — but at least it only carries her voice. Right now that’s invaluable; she can wear whatever hateful expression she wants, and no-one will be any the wiser. It’s a comfort, and rather necessary given her present mood, to know that Mary Margaret has no idea that her doting midwife is hurling fireballs at the wall while she’s listening to her prattle.

 _“I talked to Emma,”_ Mary Margaret says, her voice crackling down the line.

Zelena studies the flame in her palm, uses the heat to ground herself. “Oh?”

 _“She seemed to think…”_ There’s an audible swallow. _“Well, I had no idea it was so personal for you.”_

Zelena rolls her eyes, and scorches another hole in the wallpaper. “Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘personal’,” she says, hoping that her voice sounds more like a smile than a sneer. “I’m here to take care of your family, remember? My own experiences… well, they’re irrelevant.”

 _“Nonsense,”_ Mary Margaret babbles. She’s a persistent one, clingy and over-eager; she’s less like her daughter with every word. _“If you’re going to be helping with the baby, you’re practically part of the family yourself.”_

Zelena doesn’t point out that the very thought makes her want to be sick. She doesn’t point out that Snow White’s idea of ‘family’ is the last thing in the world she’d want for herself. She just conjures another fireball, crushes it in her fist, and says, “You flatter me.”

It might be all right if it stopped there, but of course Snow White has never known when to keep her mouth shut. Mary Margaret is not so far away from that know-it-all little princess that Zelena met all those years ago in the Enchanted Forest; there’s no more difference between those two idiots than there is between the smiling midwife and the angry, frightened little girl who flinched when her father raised the switch. Neither one of them, Snow or Zelena, can break away from their origins, the circumstances that made them who they are, and in Snow’s case that means an endless stream of unwanted compassion.

 _“I know what it’s like to have a part of your past you don’t want to talk about,”_ she says, and Zelena bites down on the side of her hand — still flame-hot — to keep from screaming ‘no you don’t!’ into the receiver.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she grits out, hoarse and angry. “But I really don’t think any of this is important. The past is out of our reach, after all. Best not to think about it too much if we can help it.”

Ah, but if only that were true. How much pain could she have spared herself if she could just take her own advice? How different would her life be now if she could leave her sordid, stupid past where it belongs? How easy would it be to breathe if she could move on from the abandonment, the pain and the fear, the hell she had to live for so long, the constant echo of _‘wicked’_ and _‘worthless’_ and _‘wrong’_? Wouldn’t it all be so bloody wonderful if she didn’t have to suffer those voices in her head, her father telling her she’s not good enough and her mother throwing her away, eyes on the horizon as she searches for her own ‘best chance’?

The past might be out of reach, but it’s had a stranglehold on her for as long as she can remember, and she can no more let it go than Snow White can see the scorch marks on her wall through the static-riddled telephone. There’s no ignoring it, no casting it aside or taking her own advice, no doing any of the idealistic things she so desperately wants Mary Margaret to believe she can.

And believe she does. Perhaps it’s a trick of this infernal speaking device, this ridiculous contraption that allows people to listen across great distances without magic. Perhaps it broadcasts what the speaker wants instead of what they really feel, because Mary Margaret doesn’t hear the truth at all, only the cheap, pathetic lies. Back at the docks, Emma Swan seemed to see through all of Zelena’s deceptions, to pierce the bones of what she was really feeling without a thought, but Snow White is a princess, no matter what name she wears, and princesses always believe what they’re told.

 _“Of course.”_ She’s smiling, Zelena can tell. Much like her own baby-loving alter ego, it seems that Mary Margaret is always smiling. _“Whatever things were like for you in our world, you’re in a new one. A fresh start for all of us.”_

“That’s good to hear,” Zelena mumbles. She means it derisively, but her body doesn’t seem to get that particular memo; it shudders, and the flame in her hand vanishes without permission. “But I really don’t—”

 _“Family,”_ Mary Margaret says again, firmly now. _“It’s not just about blood.”_

Zelena’s body gives another uninvited twitch. She has to catch her breath, has to focus very hard before she can let herself speak again, before she trusts the feeling not to bleed out through her voice.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says at last, and ends the call before the tremors can rise up and give her away.

She keeps the phone pressed to her ear even after the line goes dead, listening to the hum and hiss of static. It never goes completely silent even when there’s no-one else there, like the voices of the dead or the lost. It must be nice, she thinks, having a companion like this thing to keep you company during the lonely days, something mindless but always there. Like a flying monkey or Dorothy’s disgusting mutt, only less screechy.

She’s not sure why all of this has affected her so much, why she feels so raw. She’s worked hard on her little charade, memorised all the best ways to get into Mary Margaret’s affections, learned all the sensitive places to prod and press and push; she knew that this conversation was a possibility long before the Saviour dragged it out of her. Snow White is nothing if not utterly predictable, in any land or under any pseudonym, and Zelena knows that she can’t resist a good sob story. No doubt it makes her feel like a great hero, pretending to care about the little people.

It’s Emma’s fault. She’s who’s the outlier. Emma Swan, with her ‘latent issues’, with all that too-familiar pain etched under her skin, with all the ways Zelena understood the words she didn’t say, the deeper hurts she would never admit to. _Why wasn’t I good enough? What does this new child have that I don’t?_ They never die, those questions, no matter how old a person gets. Zelena knows that far too well. She’s older than Emma, and she still feels like a child when she hears them.

Maybe in another world, another life, they could be friends. Connected by this shared loneliness, this sense of pain and abandonment and…

…well. Is it really _loss_ when you never knew it in the first place?

It’s so strange, so unfair. The two of them, abandoned and thrown away, but with such different fates. One child thrown into a closet, sent to another world to grow up into the Saviour; the other carried away by a cyclone to a world where she was doomed to descend into wickedness. It’s clearly about something deeper than abandonment, something worse than being unwanted or unloved or badly treated. Zelena has seen the look she saw on Emma’s face a thousand times before; she knows it as well as she knows the colours of her own skin; they’ve both been hurt, both suffered terribly for the so-called sacrifices of their parents. But somehow Emma has grown and grown, become more than her circumstances made her.

How? How is it that she was good enough and Zelena was not?

Another failure for her growing stockpile, she thinks. Another addition to the list of reasons why Cora was right to give her away, to wash her hands of her and start fresh with Regina. Clearly she sensed all this before her first-born even opened her eyes.

Will she still be like this when this is all over, she wonders. When she finally gets what she wants, what she wants so desperately to believe she deserves, when this pathetic present is gone and the past is rewritten the way it should be, will she still be wicked? Will she still be worthless?

She throws the telephone against the wall, relishes the _crunch_ as it smashes, then waves an impatient hand to put it back together. Her hands are shaking like her father’s used to, not with drink but with anger, with self-loathing, with the terrible tiny part of her that actually wanted to hear the nonsense Mary Margaret was trying to say.

 _“You’re practically part of the family,”_ she said. Zelena couldn’t scream then, not without being heard, but she can now and she does. Here in the privacy of her little farmhouse, she lets it all out, as long and as loud as she can, a scream to bring down the ceiling, on and on until the pain of it razes her throat and lungs.

“I don’t want your family!” she bellows at the empty air, over and over.

It’s true. That’s the hard part. If it wasn’t, maybe there would be some hope for her, but it is, and she can’t change that. She doesn’t want anything to do with Snow White or Mary Margaret or whoever; she doesn’t want anything to do with Emma Swan or Prince Charming or any of them. She doesn’t want their sickening, saccharine definition of ‘family’. She doesn’t want any part of this stupid new world with its stupid technology and its stupid toasters and its stupid bloody telephones.

All she wants, all she’s ever wanted, is her mother.

***


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Warning: dub-con by deception, as seen in canon.

***

New York is even worse than Storybrooke.

That’s quite the achievement, to be blunt. Zelena was starting to think there wasn’t a place in any realm as suffocating as that insidious little town, but New York City is another monster entirely, and one with incredibly sharp teeth. She thought she knew what the word ‘city’ meant — grand, green, and glowing — but this place is nothing like the one she remembers from Oz. The Emerald City may have been big but at least it kept some measure of order. This place is pure undiluted chaos, and it never, ever stops.

It doesn’t help that she’s crippled here, shorn of her magic and effectively helpless. She couldn’t use it freely anyway, being forced to play the dutiful Marian, but at least she’d have the comfort of knowing it was there if she needed it; at least she’d be able to feel the pulse of power inside her, at least she could use it to remember that she’s still herself. It’s bad enough that she has to see another woman’s face in the mirror every morning without also being stripped of the one thing that’s always defined her.

Robin, thicker than a plank, doesn’t even notice that his beloved wife isn’t herself. It’s all too easy, Zelena supposes, to blame any differences on their new surroundings, on her struggle to cope with this nightmare of a city. Apparently Marian was a delicate, fragile little thing, so much so that Robin doesn’t even bat an eyelid when she can’t adapt to the modern nonsense of a land without magic. When the smog gives her headaches or when the death-trap ‘cars’ and ‘buses’ make her nauseous, when the noise makes her irritable or the people make her angry… well, it’s _Marian_.

Zelena doesn’t enjoy being weak, but she can’t deny it has its uses. There’s not much she can depend on out here, stripped as she is of her usual tricks, so she’ll take anything she can find that might give her an edge. Playing the weak, trembling little maid-flower keeps Robin in line, keeps him doting and attentive, and keeps him from looking too hard at the moments when she forgets things that would be obvious to the real Marian. Excuses become second nature for both of them, and if he has any concerns about her behaviour he’s thoughtful enough to keep them to himself.

Roland, poor little brat, is a different story. He’s observant, clever in a way that Robin definitely isn’t, and he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. Evidently, he takes after his mother.

It doesn’t help that he’s a sweet child, loyal and giving and almost unbearably sensitive. He doesn’t like this abhorrent city any better than Zelena does, but he cares more about her misery than his own. He squeezes her hand every time they leave the wreck Robin calls an apartment, and when he looks up at her with those big, doting eyes it takes every ounce of self-control Zelena has ever had not to melt.

She tells herself the boy is just an unfortunate casualty in her war against Regina. This sordid little arrangement is about destroying her happy ending, after all; Zelena was never under any illusion of forging the perfect nuclear family with Robin and his spawn. Still, for all that she she keeps Regina’s face at the front of her mind, it’s harder than she expected it to be to kiss someone else’s son goodnight while remembering how she murdered his mother.

One afternoon when it’s just the two of them — Robin’s off who knows where; he never tells her and she doesn’t care to ask — Roland looks up at her and says, “I’m sorry you’re sad.”

Zelena almost chokes. She’s not sure what’s worse: that the little boy is perceptive enough to recognise something’s not right with his mother, or that his first thought is that she’s the one who needs comforting. Poor thing. If he had any idea…

She shakes off the thought. She has to; if she doesn’t, she’ll give herself away.

“Now, where’s all this coming from?” she asks, forcing maternal lightness.

He thinks about that for a little while. She can see the strain on his face as he tries to put the pieces together. He’s just about clever enough to know that something’s not right but not quite enough to point out any specific issue and say _‘that’s why’_.

“You don’t smile any more,” he says at last, then nods to himself, as though satisfied that he found the right answer. “And you don’t laugh.”

“Of course I do,” she says, and forces one just to prove him wrong.

It’s just a show, of course, and a poor one at that; she knows that as well as he does. Oh, she makes the effort sometimes, gorging herself on thoughts of lonely, miserable Regina, visions of her crying herself to sleep at night, but it never quite touches her face. She tells herself it’s just difficult to control Marian’s stiff, strange features, but of course that’s not really true. Heaven help her, she actually feels guilty relishing other people’s misery in front of a child.

Of course he doesn’t buy it. Children never do; they can cut through dishonesty like a bloody dagger. “Nuh _uh_ ,” he says, pouting. “You _never_ do.”

“I do _sometimes_ ,” she argues; there’s nothing quite as effective as arguing with a child at bringing out her own childishness. It’s harder than she’d care to admit, reining it in and pretending to be a mother again. “Things are just a little harder here, that’s all. We’re still adjusting.”

“What’s that mean?” He runs the word over his tongue, testing and tasting it. “Ad- _jusss_ -tink.”

She doesn’t quite laugh at that, but she definitely manages a smile. Somewhat astonishingly, given his genetic material, Roland is rather adorable when he wants to be.

“It means we’re still getting used to this place,” she explains. “The noise, the people, all of it. But it’s okay. We’ll get there.” She digs down deep, seeks out the little parts of Marian she keeps close at hand for reference. “We always do, don’t we?”

He ponders that. Then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, he smiles too.

“Always,” he echoes brightly, though she has a sneaking suspicion he doesn’t really understand that word either. “You and me and pappa.”

Zelena swallows over a lump in her throat. “That’s right,” she says.

Years of being feared and hated and unwanted have schooled Zelena well in the art of self-loathing, but she’s never felt it quite so potently as she does when Marian’s son looks up and believes without question every lying word out of her mouth. She’s long since given up on any illusions of being anything more than worthless and wicked, but this is worse than even she could have expected from herself. She has killed men and munchkins without so much as a thought, but to hurt a child even just by deception is a bitter, jagged pill to swallow; all of a sudden she is dangerously, sickeningly close to becoming the very worst things that happened to her.

Roland is still staring up at her, his eyes bright and hopeful. There’s nothing else in the world he wants more than for his parents to be happy, for his family to find some peace here. It’s all he needs to make this twisted travesty of a world seem all right. Children can survive almost anything, Zelena has learned, just as long as they have something better to hope for.

She kneels to kiss him on the forehead. “Mummy loves you.”

The words transform on the air, distorted unpleasantly by Marian’s accent. _Mommy lurves yoouu._ It sounds so primitive, so crude, but it’s worth it for the way Roland brightens, the way he starts to glow. That’s all it takes just, three little words, and all is right in his world again. Oh, if only everything could be so easily fixed.

“Love you,” he parrots back, and the warmth blooming on his face makes Zelena’s heart stall in her chest.

*

She convinces herself she’s doing them a favour.

It has to be better, doesn’t it? It has to be better that little Roland believes his mother’s still alive than knows she’s never coming back. Better to keep up this illusion, this glamour, if it protects him from the darker reality, the guilt and the grief that comes with it. What child wouldn’t want to be sheltered from such a tragic, terrible truth? What child wouldn’t want to go on believing their mother is still with them?

God knows, if she’d had the choice she would’ve taken the lie without hesitation. If her father — the man who wasn’t her father, the man who wounded her more with his words than he ever did with his hands — had only kept his mouth shut, how much pain would she have been spared? How much pain would all of Oz have been spared if the Wicked Witch had never been given a reason to exist?

Robin, on the other hand, isn’t nearly so straightforward. Roland might believe everything he hears and mean everything he says, but his father is a grown-up and things are always so much messier with grown-ups.

Trying to salvage some shred of marital bliss is a challenge for more than just the obvious reasons. It’s not a secret that Robin doesn’t care any more for the woman he thinks she is than the one hiding behind the glamour. That ship sank long before Zelena got her claws into Marian, and she has long since made her peace with the fact that it’s not going to resurface any time soon.

It’s easier, in a way, when she knows she’s not the real problem, when she knows it’s about Robin’s runaway heart and not the ten thousand tells she gives away every day. She knew before she went into this that love was never on the cards for either of them; hell, she doesn’t much care for him either, to be frank. All she wanted was to keep him safe and sound and out of Regina’s clutches, to fall asleep knowing that for the first time in her life she’s the one cuddling her sister’s toys.

It works well enough when they’re tiptoeing and treading on eggshells around each other, when they’re both clinging to the same awkward distance. But sometimes he tries a bit harder, steps into her personal space and comes on a little stronger, no doubt driven by his ridiculous code of honour, and that’s when the waters get a little murkier.

He kisses her hungrily, almost desperately, like a man on a mission, like he thinks he can drag the love out of them both if he presses their bodies close enough. Zelena responds in kind, of course, fierce and just as hungry in her own stupid way, reaching and aching for something she knows was never there. It’s not enjoyable, not in any way that counts, but it’s all they have.

Zelena doesn’t care if Robin Hood loves her, and she definitely doesn’t care if he wants her, but when he’s kissing her and touching her and pretending that he does, when her eyes are closed and his hands are wandering, if she just holds her breath long enough and drowns out all the ways neither of them really wants this, she can almost, _almost_ pretend she does.

It’s nothing personal. At least, it’s not just about the fact that he smells like a damp forest. Fact is, she doesn’t want anyone. Not a partner or a husband, not even a lover. She’s survived perfectly well all on her own for long enough, hasn’t she? She’s never been in the market for wedded bloody bliss.

But _oh_ , tell that to her body when his lips linger in just the right way or his hands find just the right place. More specifically, tell it to Marian’s body when it responds as though by muscle memory, as though it’s danced this dance a thousand times before. When that happens, rare though the moments are, she finds that she doesn’t care who he is or who she’s supposed to be or why either one of them are here at all. _Regina who?_ , she thinks, desperate and drunk. She’s just as starved for this as she is for everything else she’s never had.

They don’t make love often, blessedly, and when they do he’s the one who starts it. It’s less a moral decision on her part, and more a lack of general interest, but it keeps her on the right side of the line and so she clings to it. Not that he needs much coaxing once he gets the idea into his head anyway; it’s like he has something to prove to himself, like he believes his performance in bed is a measure of his feelings.

Well, let him believe that if it helps him to sleep at night. Zelena’s personal opinion on the subject is far from flattering, but she’s just about compassionate enough to keep that to herself. It’s not really his fault, after all, and she’s never been one to blame a man for failing when he’s giving it his best shot. Robin knows his wife very well, but Zelena is not his wife and the things that would have worked for Marian don’t work for her at all. Honestly, it’s probably better that way; no need to make this any more complicated than it already is, and it’s so much simpler when this is all just business for them both.

He tries, though. He shouldn’t, but he does.

“I do love you,” he whispers, rolling off her. “I swear I do.”

Zelena hides Marian’s face in the pillows. It’s the middle of the night and she really couldn’t care less, but even she isn’t so heartless as to say that when he’s trying so hard.

“I know you do,” she says, like she does every time.

She’s not trying to be cruel by withholding the obvious _‘I love you too’._ Mostly, it’s just that she’s tired and breathless and, well, sore. He might be a dead-eye shot with his bow, but his aim with other things leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t exactly lend itself to the kind of affection he’s searching for with this, and while he might be bound by his code of bloody honour to end a roll in the sack with a proclamation of love Zelena isn’t nearly so overburdened. She doesn’t care if holding back the ‘L’ word will hurt his delicate feelings or make him question his masculinity. She’s done her part; now she just wants to roll over and get some bloody sleep.

Usually, he lets the coolness slide, but tonight he can’t seem to bear it. Apparently he’s more awake than she is, because he sighs and says, “Marian.”

Zelena closes her eyes, counts silently to ten. “Robin, dear, it’s late.”

“I know.” He sits up a little, resting on his elbow. There’s a sad, guilty look on his face, one she’s only seen a few times before; unfortunately for them both, she knows what it means, and braces for what she knows is coming. “It’s not just about Regina, is it?”

Zelena groans. It’s not hard to fake Marian’s annoyance. “Her again?”

“I know, I know. I shouldn’t even be thinking about her any more.”

That’s true enough, but Zelena was never so idealistic as to assume that deleting her number would put an end to the pining. Still, she can’t quite stop the spiteful little place inside her that shoots back, “Well, not in _bed_.”

“I know.” This time, at least, he has the grace to blush. “It’s just… I thought things would get easier with time, you know? But if possible, I’d swear they’ve gotten harder. Have we really changed so much?”

“It’s this place,” Zelena says. Easy, rehearsed. She’s said it a thousand times. “This awful city.”

The words come naturally, flowing off her tongue, because they’re buoyed by a grain of truth. Whatever her feelings about Robin or Regina or even little Roland, it’s hard to shake the unpleasantness of New York, the hustle and bustle, the noise and the smoke and all the rest of it. Everything here seems deliberately designed to make her feel angry or sick, to give her a headache or lash at her temper, to say nothing of the pain of being without her powers. Some days she has to squeeze the six-leaf clover so tight the pendant leaves a mark on her palm, just to remember how it feels to have magic there.

“I know it’s not ideal,” Robin is babbling. “But we’re together, you and me and Roland. We’re together, and and we’re alive. Isn’t that what matters?”

“Of course.” Eyes still closed, biting her lip, she replaces the vision of Regina with one of Roland. “Funny. He’s adapted better than either one of us.”

“Well, children are stronger than you’d think.”

Zelena knows that. She said the very same thing to Snow White that first day in Granny’s diner, back when she was trying to convince her she was just a sweet little midwife. It worked on the impressionable princess, but it doesn’t work nearly so well out here. It just makes Zelena feel like an idiot.

“So what does that make us?” she asks. “Weaker than children?”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Finally, he’s starting to sound as tired as she is. “I’m sorry. I seem to be saying everything all wrong tonight.”

There’s guilt in his voice, and when she looks up at him she finds it in his eyes too. Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe it’s not really about Regina at all, but that guilt makes a compelling argument to the contrary. Zelena sighs, rolls over until she’s facing away from him. She won’t say her name, won’t taint their home by giving it voice, but there’s no escaping it; like her whole adult life, there’s no escaping _her_. They can kiss and touch each other and make love a thousand times, but the void between them has nothing to do with the city or the changes in her, or anything else. No, no, no. Like always, it’s Regina.

“What do you want to do?” she asks him, in less than a whisper.

A small, masochistic piece of her almost wants to hear him say it, to finally admit out loud what she knows he’s been thinking from the beginning. She knows it, he knows it… hell, by this point even Roland probably has his suspicions, but that bloody code of honour means he’s just going to keep right on denying it to the very end. He won’t even do her the courtesy of saying it to her face, of owning his heartache before it tears them both apart.

“I don’t know,” he says at last. A cheap answer, and a lie, but at least he tries to make it convincing. “I want things to be like they used to be, but I don’t know if that can happen here. I want…”

He’s hovering over her now, all broad shoulders and soft smile, and for just a second, almost despite herself, Zelena finds her breath stuttering. “What?”

But then it’s gone, the moment and the softness, all of it, and he’s the same hapless buffoon who has no idea how to please her. “I just want you to be happy, Marian. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

 _Then admit it,_ she thinks. _If you really want me to be happy, admit that you’re miserable. Admit that all you really want is her. Admit that you’re only here because you think you should be. Admit that you hate this city, this apartment, this life. For the love of all things holy, Robin, admit that you hate me!_

The ferocity of the thought stuns her. How ruined is she, that she can only find happiness in someone else’s misery? How far beyond redemption, beyond repair, must she be if she can’t find peace as long as others have it? What kind of a woman is that to spend a life with? What kind of a woman is that to raise a child?

Roland might not be hers, but it’s so hard not to care about him anyway. Children have always been her weakness, ever since she was one, and when he smiles up at her like she really is his mother it’s all she can do not to wish she really was. But what kind of an influence is she? What kind of a terrible, awful, _wicked_ mother can only be happy when everyone around her is miserable?

The thought strangles her, tightens like a chain around her neck, and all of a sudden she’s choking on a sob.

Robin’s right there in a heartbeat, pulling her into his arms and holding her close, rocking her like he rocks Roland when he has a bad dream, no doubt like he used to rock the real Marian when she did. Zelena wants to shove him away, wants to throw him across the room with her magic, only she doesn’t have any and she wouldn’t even if she did. She’s helpless, pulled down under the waves her own self-loathing, and there’s nothing she can do but lie there and let it happen, let him try to comfort her, let them both imagine if just for a moment that they really are husband and wife.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, over and over. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get through it. We’ll be okay. It’s okay, it’s okay…”

Her body sways in rhythm with the words, lulled in his arms like a boat tossed on the water. The motion is less unpleasant than those death-traps they call vehicles, not least of all because here, at least, she feels safe.

This is what Regina is missing, she reminds herself. This is what she should have, what she spends her nights wishing and aching for. This is Regina’s perfect happy ending, and it’s here, holding her should-be-dead sister, keeping her safe, wrapping her up and keeping her afloat. This is all the peace and security, the love and the home and the family that was stolen from her before she was even born. This, _this_ is what she spent her life trying to claw back from the one person in every land who did not deserve it.

She closes her eyes and pictures it, pictures Regina’s stricken face, pictures her dark eyes pricked with tears, with pain, with everything that turned and tainted and twisted Zelena into the tainted, wicked, horrible thing she is now, this monster of a person who can only be happy when others are hurting like she did. It’s a vivid image, full of hate and hurt, and she holds it as close as Robin holds her.

“Yes,” she whispers, willing it to be true, willing herself to believe it. _Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, yes, she’s suffering because of me, yes, this is enough…_

She pulls back just enough to look Robin in the eye. She finds worry there, and something devastatingly close to love, and it sets her heart on fire. Fake fire, fake like everything in this city, fake like their marriage, but close enough to the real thing that if she holds perfectly still she can make believe it’s real, make believe it’s magic, make believe it’s _hers_.

He kisses her again, slowly this time, and she lets it happen, lets herself want it, want him. He’s so tender, every touch a question, a whisper, a breath; he kisses her like a flower, like the rain, like every beautiful delicate thing in this pathetic excuse for a world. He kisses her like _Marian_ , like that pretty young woman with no idea of what’s about to happen to her, like she deserves every kindness the world has in it.

She doesn’t. Marian did, but she’s dead now, just like every other delicate and beautiful thing Zelena touches, and the wicked monster in her place doesn’t deserve any of this. She doesn’t deserve it and she doesn’t want it, at least not like this, not with so much tenderness and softness and love. Robin is trying so hard, but it’s not working, and it never will for as long as he does it this way. Zelena is not Marian, will never be Marian, and Robin will never be able to love her while he’s treating her like she is.

She stops him when his hands slide down over her ribs. “No.”

He stops, flushing hot. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I thought…”

“I know.” She kisses him, not gentle but rough, not like Marian but like herself, with sharp teeth and just a bite of wickedness. “Like _that_.”

He swallows; the line of his throat is a work of art. He is more delicate and fragile than she will ever be; the sooner he realises that, the better for them both.

“Are you sure?” he asks in a whisper.

She covers his hand with her own, lets him feel the tremors there. She’s never let anyone see this in her before, much less feel it, much less get close enough to do anything about it. He has no idea what a rare thing he’s being exposed to, how much of herself she’s showing now, things she has never before let out in front of another person. He has no idea how real this is, how profound and painful, and that’s the only reason she can do it. If he knew, if he had any idea, she wouldn’t be able to.

“I’m sure,” she says.

And then, for a few blessed minutes, she doesn’t say anything at all.

*

Roland notices the change in her, of course.

He’s such a clever boy, too clever for his own good. That intelligence is going to be a burden to him in a world like this, so full of people who don’t say what they mean, who shout and storm about and make everything so bloody complicated. He’s sensitive and sweet, and though Zelena isn’t really his mother there’s still a part of her that worries about him.

He starts to smile more, taking his cues from her when she does the same. It lights up the dank apartment, makes it feel more like a home; more often than she’d care to admit, Zelena forgets where she is and why she’s here, forgets that this is an act of vengeance and not a quest for happiness. Her own is irrelevant, just as it always has been; she was never under any illusion that she could find peace here any more than she ever found it anywhere else. She keeps the truth close to her chest, as close as the six-leaf clover, reminding herself again and again that she is not here to be happy.

Most days it’s no challenge to remember her own misery; this place is still hell on earth, after all. But every now and then, despite her best efforts, there are moments when happiness bleeds through anyway.

They go outside more, her and Roland. Zelena is still not entirely comfortable with the city, the buildings that aren’t green and the people who are everywhere, but she is slowly learning to adapt, and as long as she doesn’t spend too long in a car or on the busy streets she finds that it’s less of an ordeal by the day.

As with everything else, Roland adapts more quickly and more readily than she does. He hates the smoke and the noise too, but he loves going outside, loves running around and getting into trouble, doing all the things that little boys do in every world or kingdom known to man. He’s such a normal little boy, so full of life and energy, and Zelena indulges him more than she should. What she wouldn’t give to have known such freedom at his age.

Besides, it’s nice to have someone who doesn’t feel ashamed of his feelings. Robin, for all his efforts, still keeps his bottled up; talking to him is like talking to a wall most of the time, and his company is frequently more stifling than solitude. Roland is the one thing they have in common, the one thing they both love the same.

He’s running around now, excited like he always is to be out of the apartment, and though she knows she should be telling him to slow down and be careful — there’s danger everywhere in this blasted city — Zelena finds herself unwilling to spoil his fun. He radiates joy when he’s laughing and running like this, and to someone like Zelena, who can barely remember what joy feels like, there’s something utterly addictive in sharing his freedom, his wide-eyed exuberance, the thrill of being alive.

That thrill, for both of them, lasts maybe another fifteen seconds.

Roland might be a bright boy, but he doesn’t look where he’s going. His focus is on the ground under his feet or else the clouds above his head, and much like his father he doesn’t pay attention to the world around him. That would be fine, even understandable in a world as disgusting as this one, but for the fact that no-one else in this ridiculous land looks where they’re going either. The grown-ups, the ones who should know better, they’re every bit as self-absorbed and stupid as the children, and that’s a recipe for disaster. Zelena knows that quite intimately; she’s been self-absorbed and stupid her whole life.

The moment, terrible though it is, is inevitable. Some idiot in a hurry, tearing up the sidewalk on one of those bicycle contraptions without the least thought for anyone else, and of course it’s poor little Roland who gets in his way, of course it is, _of course_ it bloody is.

Zelena has always had a unique relationship with time, but she’s never seen it bend quite like this before. She’s never had to stand and watch, helpless and frozen as it slows down all around her, the blink of an eye condensed and contracted until it seems to last an eternity. Everything else is still moving, but she’s utterly still, unable to move at all; it’s like she’s stuck in an immobilisation spell, and there’s nothing she can do but stand there as the contraption slams into him, as Roland screams and goes down, as the worthless, cowardly cyclist just keeps right on going.

The next thing she knows, she’s standing there with her hand stretched out, reaching for the rage in her chest, the spark that has never let her down before. She’ll kill him, she’s decided, incinerate him and his little bicycle too… only nothing happens when she tries.

There’s nothing there, nothing inside her, and her hand is empty and cold. No spark, no fireball, no magic, and _oh no, oh god,_ she’s helpless, she’s useless, and…

…and all of a sudden he’s gone, the idiot on the bicycle, the idiot she wants to kill, tearing off into the crowd and no-one else has even noticed. Roland is sprawled in a heap on the floor, howling and crying and Zelena can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t do anything, and why, _why_ isn’t anyone helping him? Why doesn’t anyone care?

And then, as if by another kind of magic, she finds that she’s there, she’s at his side with no idea how the hell that happened, when the hell she started moving. She’s kneeling there on the dirty, gritty sidewalk, cradling him and trying so hard to soothe him, and it doesn’t matter how she got there, doesn’t matter when or why it happened, only that it did, that she’s there, she’s got him in her arms, she’s trying, dammit, she’s _trying_.

They’re both crying now, Roland because he’s in pain and Zelena because she can’t do anything, because he won’t calm down, because she can’t make it better, because she has no magic in this stupid land, because she can’t heal him and she can’t incinerate the idiot who did this to him, because she can’t even kiss him and make it better.

She could if she was really his mother. She knows that. True love can work magic even in a land with none. But Roland is not her son and Zelena has never felt anything true in all her life.

The damage isn’t bad. She can see that, though of course it doesn’t help. A few scrapes and grazes, a gash on his cheek where he hit the ground… mostly, he’s just shaken and a little shell-shocked. Well, that’s understandable; she is too. But then, it’s not about that, is it? It’s not about how painful it is, how badly he’s hurt; it’s the fact that he _was_ hurt, that someone _did_ hurt him, that there was nothing she could do to stop it.

He’s looking up at her, eyes wide and drowned in tears, and his voice is shaking and high, _“mama!”_ over and over and over, and what can she do, what should she do, what would a real mother do?

“It’s all right,” she whispers, willing it to be true, knowing that it’s not. “It’s all right. Mummy’s here, I’m here, it’s all right.”

In all the time since she stole Marian’s body, she’s never once wanted to be like her. The woman was a wet rag, a blank piece of parchment without any potential at all; like her forest-fresh husband she was just plain boring, and that’s the opposite of everything Zelena feels about herself. She’s never wanted to be boring, to be vacuous and sugary or whatever other nonsense these people appreciate, but now, for the first time, she finds that she would give up everything she is to become like that; she would give up her whole world, her whole identity if it would just keep Roland from crying, if only it would end his pain.

It won’t, though, and she can’t. Because she is a witch and she is wicked, and she can pretend all she wants but she won’t ever be Marian. Not for Robin, who tries so hard to love her as his wife, and not for Roland, who only wants his mother to make everything better. She can’t be the woman these idiots need, and it has been so, so long since she cared enough to want to be, since she wanted to heal people instead of hurt them. She’s never known kindness, never felt it before; what the hell is she supposed to do with it now?

Roland wails, struggling in her arms. “Mama, it _hurts_.”

Zelena kisses his gashed cheek, even as she knows it won’t do any good.

“I know, sweetheart,” she whispers. “It hurts me too.”

*

They’ve been home maybe a couple of hours when Robin gets back.

They’ve both stopped crying by then, not that it helps any. He takes one look at Roland’s face, turns white as a sheet, and says, “My god, what happened?”

Zelena rolls her eyes. It’s just bloody typical of him, isn’t it? Dumb as a doorknob most days, can’t even see what’s right under his nose, but when it comes down to what really matters, he steps up and makes good. That has to be a hero thing, the instinctual nonsense that comes so easily to people with goodness in their hearts. Glinda was exactly the same way, she remembers bitterly, and can’t mask the way her fingers twitch and tighten into a fist.

“This city,” she says, when she trusts herself to speak.

Robin opens his mouth to press her, to ask for more details — she can already see _‘how’_ and _‘what’_ and _‘why’_ spinning comically around his head — but a sad little whimper from Roland silences him before he can get them out. He shuts his mouth, then, and rushes to his son’s side without another word, wrapping him up in his arms and holding him close.

It’s more powerful coming from him than from Zelena because they really are bound by blood, and even though Roland has been dry-eyed for some time now, still he transforms completely the instant he’s in his pappa’s arms. Just like that, all the pain and misery is gone, swept up in raw, real love.

Zelena’s ribs squeeze her lungs, tighter and tighter until she can’t breathe. It’s not quite jealousy, the feeling that surges in her, but it’s skirting dangerously close. She knows envy better than anyone — it’s been her constant companion for as long as she can remember — but this is the first time it’s made her feel ashamed. Roland is happy now, or at least happier than he was a moment ago, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he feels safe in his father’s arms; the accident, painful and stupid, is already dissolving to memory for him now that he’s where he should be.

That should be enough. Zelena knows that. Wasn’t it just a minute ago that she was gutted by her own helplessness? Shouldn’t it be enough that someone can help the boy, even if it’s not her?

But no, no, it’s not. Because selfishly, stupidly, even cruelly, all she can think of is how she wishes it was.

She watches from a distance, silent and sad, as Robin puts his son to bed, as he reads him a bedtime story and kisses him goodnight, as he does all the things she’s been doing these past few weeks, pretending to be his loving mother. Roland smiles when she does it, of course, but he never lights up the way he’s doing now. It’s nothing special with her, a routine so automatic that it’s become second nature for them both, but with Robin the same routine becomes something special, a magic all its own.

Zelena knows she’ll never be able to compete with that. True love, the purest kind, the kind between a parent and child. It’s always been out of her reach; why would she expect that to change now?

Robin comes to her after Roland’s asleep. His face is weary, lined with worry, but he keeps it in check for her sake. Like she needs his bloody charity, his bloody compassion.

“He’ll be fine,” he says.

Zelena opens her mouth to tell him she knows that, but what comes out instead is, “I’m sorry.”

Robin sighs. He was expecting this, she can tell. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I should have done something.” Marian’s voice hitches when she speaks, pathetic and small. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to… there’s no _magic_ here. I didn’t…”

“You never needed magic to take care of him before,” Robin says. He’s not suspicious; sweet as he is, he’s just trying to reassure her. “You just need to have more faith in yourself.”

Zelena laughs weakly at that. “Easy for you to say. You’re his father.”

“And you’re his mother.”

_No, I’m not. I’m not and I’ll never be and I shouldn’t be. I don’t deserve to be his mother. I don’t deserve the way he looks at me, the way he believes in me. I don’t deserve any of this._

She doesn’t say it. She wants to, so much it hurts. Robin might not love her the way his code of honour says he should, but he still treats her as his wife, his precious Marian. He still looks at her like he wants her to open up, to bare her heart and her soul to him, like he really does care how she feels. Zelena knows it’s not real, knows it’s not true, but it’s hard to remember that when no-one else has ever wanted those things from her before. It’s hard not to try and be what he wants when he’s looking at her like that, when it’s suddenly so obvious that not being in love isn’t the same as not caring.

She opens her mouth, not really sure what she wants to say, what she can say. There’s no way to give voice to what she’s really feeling, all the deception and the lies and the terrible ways she’s hurting Robin and his beautiful son, no way to make it sound like anything other than the wicked deed it is, but still for just a moment she wants to try. To hell with the consequences; let him go running back to Regina if that’s what he wants. At least Roland will be safe there. At least Regina will be able take care of him the way a mother should.

 _Go,_ she thinks, feverish and desperate. _Go on, go back to her. For god’s sake, for his sake, just go!_

She doesn’t get the chance to say it, though. Robin silences her with a kiss before the words reach her tongue, and by the time he pulls back they’re gone, drowned with his taste in the back of her mouth.

“You’re a good mother,” he says, ever so softly. “You’re the best mother.”

She shakes her head. She can’t speak. If she does, she’ll ruin everything.

“You _are_ ,” he presses, with an intensity that leaves them both shaking. “Roland adores you. You’re his whole world, Marian.” His breath catches, his voice a shaking whisper. “And mine.”

Zelena knows that’s not true. But oh, she wishes it was. For the first time in her life, she wishes it not for herself but for someone else. She wishes she could be the Marian that Robin loved, the mother that Roland deserves. She wishes she could follow through on this stupid little charade, not to hold her happiness over Regina’s head but because these two idiots deserve it, because they deserve so much more than someone like her. There’s not a glamour in any world powerful enough to cover over the disease rotting in her, the wickedness planted inside her at birth. She can’t bear the thought of watching that wickedness destroy another family.

“I want to be,” she whispers to Robin, a confession that burns beneath her skin.

He pulls her in, kisses her forehead just like he did Roland’s. “You are.”

It’s not true. It can’t be, at least not for the two of them.

But for Roland’s sake, they’ll both pretend.

***


	6. Chapter 6

***

“This insanity has to stop.”

The look on Regina’s face is a punch to the gut, no less powerful than the ones that tore through her just a few short hours ago, the ones that ripped the baby out of her seven months too early. It’s almost worse this time around, though, because this isn’t magic or evil or whatever else; it’s just a look, just a conversation, just bloody _Regina_ , and she has no right to make Zelena feel as helpless as she does.

Regina has never looked at her quite this way before, though, and it rends her like a spasm; the old familiar rivalry is gone, if only for a moment overshadowed by something almost soft, something almost like understanding. For the first time, it’s like she’s seeing her sister for who she really is, who she’s always been, like she finally sees the awful things that made Zelena so vengeful and jealous in the first place, the monstrosities that made her so monstrous.

 _Insanity_ , she calls it, and of course she’s right. It’s nothing short of madness, the obsession and the pain that have driven her for so long, and yes, it does need to stop. There’s almost nothing left of her now, and so little strength left to try; whatever shred of humanity Regina sees when she looks at her like that, it’s the last gasp of a flame that has been dying for decades. Does she really think she can breathe it back to life now?

“Agreed.” Her voice is tremulous, almost tearful, a stain on the senses. “But I don’t think it can.”

She really does mean that, though she doubts Regina will care. Like most heroes, or would-be heroes, she’ll throw herself off a cliff if she thinks it might save some poor lost soul. Even after everything Zelena has done to her, everything she’s done to Robin, to Roland, to everyone else in this waste-of-space little town, still she has to step up and play the reformation card. It might almost be admirable, if it wasn’t so sickening.

There’s a kind of hope in her eyes now, strange and very new, and when she says “Actually, I think maybe it can,” Zelena can tell she really, truly believes that.

Zelena wants to laugh at her, to be cruel and crude, to be wicked like she always has been before. It should be easy, even after everything she’s been through, but she’s just so _tired_.

That’s understandable, she supposes. The fatigue, if not the feelings that go with it. She might have her magic back — _at last_ , oh, she could leap for joy — but she’s sufficiently well-versed in pain to know that she’ll need more than magic to recover from the hell she’s been through. Giving birth to a child is enough of a nightmare on a good day, without dark magic hurrying it all along. She was exhausted long before the ‘birth’ part even started, raw and razed from the screams and the agony of nine months’ growth in nine bloody minutes. To say nothing of being whisked away by the new and improved Dark One just seconds after the baby was out of her.

Needless to say, after all that, it’s a miracle there’s enough left in her to form a coherent sentence, much less sustain a whole conversation. Frankly, she deserves a medal.

She doesn’t let Regina see any of that, of course. If she’s learned one thing from the unfair hand life dealt her, it’s the importance of putting on appearances. It’s the only thing that’s always served her well, the only one of her father’s hard-learned lessons that left the right kind of mark. _Put on your best face. Don’t ever let them see what’s rotting inside you._ Regina doesn’t get to know that Zelena is tired, that she’s still in pain, that she’s hanging on by a thread. She hasn’t earned the right to see the colour of her insides.

Still, somewhat unexpectedly, she asks. Why she feels the need to feign compassion, Zelena will never know; it’s not like she ever made the effort before. They both have their fair share of reasons to hate each other, and yet here she is, pretending to care all of a sudden. It’s a bit of a walk from the hospital to wherever the hell they’re going; maybe she’s just trying to fill the awkward silence. God knows, it’d make more sense than sudden sisterly concern.

Whatever her reason, there’s no sarcasm or malice in the way she looks her up and down. She doesn’t break her stride, but she sounds sincere enough when she asks, “How are you feeling?”

Zelena isn’t exactly reciprocal. Sarcasm and malice are her favourite weapons, tried and true, and she’s not about to lay them down just because Regina hasn’t put the cuff back on yet.

“Oh, just peachy, thanks.” She can’t quite muster a smirk, but she does keep her voice mostly steady; it’s a sort-of win, at least. “You know, not counting the whole ‘accelerated pregnancy’ business. Or the kidnapping. Which, by the way, wouldn’t have happened if you’d just taken off that bloody cuff of yours when I asked you to.” She’s trying desperately to look more angry than upset, but it’s not really working. “And, oh yes, let’s not forget the part when after all that I don’t even get to see the daughter I almost _died_ bringing into the world.”

Regina snorts. “You didn’t almost _die_. Why does everything always have to be a melodrama with you?”

Zelena glares. “You’d be melodramatic too if you’d just been through what I have.” She sneers. “Feel like trying it some time?”

Naturally, Regina only shakes her head. “You’re not fooling anyone with this performance, you know.”

“You’re not worth trying to fool, sister dear.” She means that, or at least she’s got herself convinced she does. “You’re the one who asked the question. I’m just the idiot who answered it.”

Regina’s heels bring her clicking to a sudden stop, and Zelena has to stop too or risk slamming into her back. Normally she wouldn’t mind — it’d be worth the inevitable spill onto the pavement just for the outrage on Regina’s face when she stumbles too — but given her present state she’s not entirely sure she could get back up again. So she settles for scowling instead, eyes flashing with green fire when Regina spins to face her.

“You might think you’re an expert in putting on a ‘good face’,” Regina says, cold but not intentionally cruel, “but you’re not. Anyone in this town could see through that bluster of yours. They just don’t care enough to try.” It’s hard to tell whether she really means it as the insult it is; there’s a flicker of guilt in her eyes as she speaks, like the words were a blow to her as well, but she powers through and keeps going. “Now, why don’t we drop the charade and just be honest with each other for once?”

Zelena looks down, finds her hands cupped over her stomach. It’s flat now, like nothing ever happened in there, but just like every other unjust hurt that’s ever been inflicted on her, if she stands perfectly still and doesn’t breathe she can still feel the kick inside, the relentless assault that knocked her off her feet.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she says.

“Oh, spare me.” Regina takes in a deep breath, lets it out in a sigh. “Tell me how you really feel, Zelena. The truth.”

Zelena shakes her head. “To hell with me,” she says, vehement and shuddering. “It’s Emma Swan you should be worrying about. Because if I ever see her again, Dark One or not, I swear I’ll…”

“Zelena.” Regina looks almost hurt, like she’s the one being threatened. “Two evil deeds don’t cancel each other out. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

“No,” Zelena says. “No, _sis_ , the only thing I’ve learned — and believe me, I’ve learned it again and again and again — is that I can’t rely on anyone’s protection but my own. I have my magic back now, and I’ll be sent back to Oz a hundred times over before I let you or anyone else take it away again. And I…” Against her orders, her voice breaks. “I will suffer far worse than that before I let your precious Dark Swan take another breath after what she did to me. I will _end her_. Do you understand?”

Regina sighs. Then, slowly and very carefully, like she’s moving through water or approaching a caged beast, she reaches for Zelena’s hand.

“Emma won’t hurt you again,” she says in a whisper. “You have my word.”

Zelena wrenches out of reach, wounded and angry. “Yes, well. Forgive me if I don’t think your word is worth very much.”

The look on Regina’s face is another blow. “Zelena…”

But Zelena doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want any of this. Regina and her forced, feigned compassion, Regina and her pretending to reach out, Regina and her acting like she doesn’t think she’s superior in every possible way. Too little too late, sis, and what good is any of this now?

The damage is already done. It’s been done so many times by now, over and over and over from the day she was born, the day their mother decided she wasn’t good enough, the day she was thrown into a cyclone and landed in a world that would do nothing but hurt her and ruin her and destroy her. It’s a lifetime’s worth of damage, a lifetime’s worth of of gut-punches and pain that leaves her breathless and wanting to scream, and what can Regina possibly do now to undo all that? It’s not enough; nothing in any world will ever be enough.

“I asked you to take it off,” she says, and she can feel the rage, the hurt, all of it cracking under her skin. “That bloody cuff of yours.”

“I know you did,” Regina says, but she doesn’t apologise.

“I _begged_ you.” She doesn’t care any more that her voice is shaking, that her whole body is. She doesn’t care about anything. “I begged you to take it off. I begged you to let me defend myself. But oh no, you couldn’t trust me. It didn’t matter that I was doubled over in pain, or that the only thing I wanted was to give birth to your boyfriend’s baby and keep us both in one piece. None of that meant a bloody thing to you, did it? The one time it really mattered, the one time I was completely at your mercy, and you’d sooner throw me to the Dark One than trust me.” She tries to sneer, but it hurts, everything hurts. “So you tell me, Regina: why the hell should _I_ trust _you_?”

Regina stares at her, seemingly struck dumb for a moment. It doesn’t last more than a breath or two, of course, but while it does Zelena feels a flood of self-satisfaction the likes of which she’s not felt for a long, long time.

Being the villain, embracing her wickedness, hasn’t really been all it’s cracked up to be; the airs and graces that she puts on are hollower than a munchkin’s skull, but hasn’t it always been that way for her? How many years did she spend trying to put on her best face, trying to make her outsides look different from her rancid, rotting insides, and where did it get her in the end? Loathed and despised and green, the perfect reflection of the wickedness within.

It’s a rare thing, feeling something on the inside that almost matches the false smiles she paints on the outside, but the look on Regina’s face right now just about does it. She looks hurt, she looks guilty, she looks terrible. She looks like all the worst things Zelena ever saw inside herself, and oh, what an attractive mirror it is to see those things reflected in the sister she spent her whole life resenting and reviling.

“Because I’m not like you,” Regina says at last. Her eyes are bright, blazing like flame. Zelena knows what that means, passion turning to power, to magic. “That’s why you should trust me.”

Zelena tries to laugh, but she can’t. The strength has long since bled out of her, the defiance and the anger and all the other dark thoughts that kept her going for so long. There’s nothing left of them now, nothing left but the empty, hollow space in her stomach, the place where her daughter grew unnaturally fast, where her growth caused so much pain, where she was ripped out of her body and her arms and won’t ever come back.

Her whole life, all Zelena has ever known is emptiness. She has only ever been unloved, unwanted, undesired; she has only ever been a disappointment, has only ever been wicked and worthless, a waste. She should be used to it by now, the gnawing in her stomach, the hollow space inside of her, but this is something entirely different. She’s felt so many things, all of them so unbearable, but in all her life she’s never known a void as black as this.

“No,” she says, but it doesn’t come out like the crude, careless dismissal she was aiming for. It comes out choked, almost strangled, and when she tries again it sounds even worse. “ _No_.”

“Zelena.”

Regina’s voice is everything hers is not. Strong, steady, it rises above the pain, the weight, the distance that has always split them. It transcends everything they were, everything they are, everything their shared mother made and did to them both. It shouldn’t be so powerful, the sound of her own name on the lips of the one person she hates more than anyone, but _oh_ , it is. Like magic but stronger, like life but less violent, like everything and nothing all at once, and it leaves a mark deeper than any she’s ever felt before. _Look,_ it seems to say. _This is the space I could have filled_.

Zelena chokes again, another _‘no’_ dying unborn inside her, a life that even the Dark Swan isn’t powerful enough to tear away, a life that was never really hers to begin with. If it was, she’s sure she would have found a way to ruin it years ago.

“You’re not my sister,” she says in a sob, and _oh_ , it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

The fire sputters out behind Regina’s eyes, and then they slide softly shut.

“Oh,” she sighs, “if only that were true.”

*

She’s not sure what she expects from this little excursion after that.

An ambush, probably. They turn down a lot of dark corners on their way to wherever the hell they’re going, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine one of the Evil Queen’s less-than-scrupulous contacts leaping out of the shadows with a knife or a borrowed spell. Zelena might have her powers back, might even be formidable even in this state, but she’s still weak and Regina has to see that. If she wanted to get her out of the way and make it look like an accident, there won’t be a better time.

She doesn’t, though. Instead, and contrary to the venom dripping off her tongue with every word she says, she brings Zelena to that godawful loft apartment, to her precious Robin Hood and—

—and to her daughter.

It’s impossible to describe the full-body blow that slams into her at the sight of them standing there, of Robin looking so much like the proud new father, of the indistinct pink bundle cradled lovingly in his arms, of the adorable little noises they’re making at each other. She hasn’t felt anything so potently painful since that day in Oz all those years ago when the Wizard showed her the moment her mother abandoned her. She’d never seen anything so small, so helpless, and she had never heard a sound so terrible as her own cries, frightened and hungry and completely alone.

Her baby, her little daughter, is not alone and she never will be. But she’s all the way over there and Zelena is all the way over here, and she has never felt more like her own mother than she does now, staring into the endless space between herself and her child.

She forces levity, of course. Cynicism and sarcasm and cruelty, the tools that have served her so well in this world. She’s been without her magic for so long, for one reason or another, that for a while it felt like they were the only weapons she had, the only arsenal that made a dent against Regina and her army of loyal serfs. Zelena has all but perfected the art of the scathing retort, the witty quip, the casual carelessness that sneaks and slithers under people’s skin, and it’s as natural as anything she’s ever done, honing in on Regina’s insecurities and finding the place to strike.

It works. For about half a second, anyway, she’s sure Regina will launch a fireball at her and put them both out of their misery. Her fist is so close, the heat sizzling between them, and it’s only when she doesn’t do it that Zelena realises she’s disappointed.

What comes next is worse, in its own way. They start _talking_ , Regina and Robin, throwing compassion at her like right hooks. The old familiar nonsense about redemption and true love and the fact that she is the baby’s mother. Well, Zelena could have told them all that herself; she doesn’t need to hear it repeated by a self-righteous pair of reformed idiots. She doesn’t care what they think of her, doesn’t care if they think she can be redeemed or not. All she cares about is the bundle in Robin’s arms.

“You can visit with our child,” Robin tells her, and all of a sudden he and the baby are so, so close, “as long as one of us are present.”

And then… _oh god_ , and then he’s easing her into Zelena’s arms, that precious bundle, the baby, _her baby_ , her daughter, her everything, and _oh, oh,_ she never thought she’d live to see a moment like this.

It’s funny; she was halfway expecting to have to fight her way out of here, to end it all if it came to that. She was willing, even eager, to go out in a blaze of glory or some other sickening heroics if that was what it took for her little girl to grow up knowing that her mother loved her, that she chose to die before being separated from her. She was so ready for all of that, ready to finally play out her last moments here — she’s so tired, so exhausted, she just wants it to be over — but instead she’s alive and so is her child, _her child_ , and she is here in her arms and oh, _oh_ , to finally have her so close, to finally be able to _hold_ her…

She cries. She’s not proud of it, but her body’s responses are out of her hands. Everything she is, every last part of her is being poured into this child, into her impossible, beautiful, perfect daughter, and there’s nothing left for silly things like dignity or self-respect.

She’s never felt anything like it before. Her daughter is tiny, half-awake and wholly unaware of the fact that the woman holding her is her mother, that they are bonded more deeply than anyone else in this poorly-decorated mess of a room. She’s just a baby; she doesn’t know or care about anything more than her next meal or nap. But how in the world is Zelena supposed to remember that when those beautiful blue eyes are staring up at her with something that looks and feels so much like love?

Zelena has never seen anything so pure, so perfect as the look on her daughter’s face, as the way those tiny little hands reach up for her hair, her hat, her face. She has tried so hard, has ached with every fibre of her being to be loved and wanted and accepted, has spent her life searching for it in a thousand places across too many worlds to count, but nothing she found ever felt anything like this. Not with Rumpelstiltskin or Glinda or Hades, not with Robin, not even on her loneliest, most desperate days, not with the father who hated her or the mother who abandoned her or the sister she spent so long resenting. A thousand new disappointments, a thousand different shapes of heartbreak, but this… _this_ …

The baby, her daughter is so fragile, so delicate; Zelena could probably break every bone in her body just by breathing on her. She should be trembling, terrified of shattering her like she does every other kind of love that passes her way, but she doesn’t feel like that at all. She doesn’t brace for impact when her little girl looks up at her, doesn’t wait for the inevitable pain when those tiny fingers find her face. Instead she feels strong and brave; for the first time in her life she feels like maybe she doesn’t need her magic, her wickedness, to make her powerful. All she needs is _this_.

A hand on her shoulder startles her, drags her out from the well of emotion. She turns, slow and so careful, to find Regina staring at her with bright, damp eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” Zelena hears herself whisper. She doesn’t care that it’s Regina, that they hate each other; all she cares about is sharing this feeling in her chest. “She’s just so beautiful.”

Regina’s smile is fractured, tearful. “Yes,” she says, very softly. “She is.”

Zelena cries a little more, cradling her daughter close. “Do you think she could love me?”

“I don’t know,” Regina says, with brutal honesty. “But she will know you, and she will know that you love her. I can promise you that.”

It’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough. How can anyone, even the Evil Queen, be so cruel as to give her a taste of this, of finally knowing what love feels like, and then take it away?

The answer, of course, is obvious: because that’s what she deserves. Regina doesn’t say the words, but Zelena hears them well enough anyway, as fierce and fiery as if they were conjured with magic. _You brought this on yourself. You chose to be wicked, you chose to become a villain. You hurt people, and what you’re getting is more than you will ever deserve. This is a kindness, witch, so be thankful._

It’s true. All of it, every word. That’s what hurts. Regina understands evil, understands cruelty better than anyone; she’s in the best position to judge Zelena for all her terrible deeds. There’s no mistaking which of the two of them is worse — the queen who razed villages to the ground or the jealous witch who only knows how to lash out — but Regina has worked so hard at her redemption, and Zelena… well, she’s never had a reason to try.

Regina believes that this child will be her reason. Zelena would never, ever admit that her sister is right about anything, but _oh_ , when she looks down into her daughter’s eyes she would do almost anything to keep from being pulled away from them again. She would apologise to every munchkin she trampled on, every idiot she turned into a flying monkey, to Dorothy and her yappy little mutt, to everyone she ever wronged or wounded in every land from here to Oz and back again. She would even apologise to Regina if she thought for a second it would make a difference.

She knows it won’t, though, and that’s why she holds her tongue. Regina has been redeemed; she’s grown and she’s matured and she’s changed her ways. Zelena has only seen little pieces of her sister’s journey, but she’s heard the way others talk about her and she has witnessed first-hand her reputation in this wretched little town. She knows what that means. She knows the cost, the price her sister must have paid, the years of mistakes and missteps, of relapses and rehabilitation, the strength and the courage it takes to come out the other side.

Zelena doesn’t have any of those things. Strength, courage, a town full of people who believe in her… hell, she doesn’t even believe in herself. Those things, the tools of redemption, are so far beyond her reach that they might as well be back in Oz for all the good they’ll do her here. Redemption isn’t on the cards for her, at least not while it matters. By the time she gets there — if she ever does, if she’s even capable of it — her daughter will be all grown up and out of reach. She’ll be _gone_.

Though she desperately wants to, Zelena doesn’t resist when Robin steps forward to take her away again.

She wants to fry him for it, to burn him to ashes before he can lay a hand on her daughter, but she doesn’t; she knows it would do more harm than good. If she sets him on fire she risks making her child fatherless, and even if she spares his life Regina will make sure she never sets foot in this place again. She hasn’t hurt her yet, but Zelena can tell she’s itching to throw a fireball at her head; she knows because she’s been feeling the same temptation from the moment their paths crossed in that blasted hospital.

She can’t allow that happen, though. Not when she’s the only one with anything to lose. And so, with great difficulty, she holds herself in check. Half-blind with tears, breathing rough and ragged, she stands there, as docile as a bloody lamb, and lets Robin pry her child out of her arms. They drop back down to her sides, empty now but somehow so much heavier than they were a moment ago. They hurt, she hurts, everything hurts, but she doesn’t argue or struggle or complain. She just stands there, limbless and numb, and cries and cries and cries.

Regina’s hand is still on her shoulder. It’s warm, but not with magic.

“You can stay a while longer,” she says. “If you want.”

 _And then what_ , Zelena thinks spitefully. _Back to my bloody cell?_

She bites her tongue, though, and swallows the words before they can sting her. For all their differences, she and Regina are alike in this: compassion doesn’t come easily to either one of them. It says a great deal that Regina is making the effort, that she’s offering something she clearly doesn’t want. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all she really wants is to be alone with Robin and the baby, to kick Zelena out of this ridiculous apartment and pretend she was never there at all, but here she is, feigning niceness because she knows it’s the right thing to do. Zelena may not have the strength of character to do the same back, but even she won’t be needlessly cruel about it.

She takes a deep breath, finds that she can’t hold it. Her whole body is so heavy; she doesn’t want to stay in this mess of an apartment any more than Regina wants her to, but the thought of stumbling down those stairs, alone and childless again, just about drains the life out of her.

“I’m tired.” It’s all she can say, the shameful, simple truth. “I’m so bloody tired.”

Regina exhales a shuddering sigh, and squeezes her shoulder.

“That makes two of us.”

*

She falls asleep on the couch, and dreams of setting Storybrooke on fire.

It’s a strange dream, and not at all pleasant. She can feel the heat, the flame, but it’s on her skin not beneath it. She’s used to having it burn inside her, the power in her chest and her veins, her blood, her bones, her everything; she’s used to fuelling the fire with her feelings, with the rage and the hate and the pain, but there are none of those things in her now. Instead the fire seems to come from some place outside, somewhere beyond her control. It’s hot, vivid, violent, and she can see that it’s coming from her, can see it rising up through the cracks in her palm, but she’s not relishing it like she usually does. No, she’s trying to _stop_ it.

She can’t, though. She tries and she tries, but nothing happens at all. The town is burning, her skin is burning, everything is burning all around her, and it’s all her fault, she’s the one making it happen, and she can’t take it back, she can’t make it stop, she can’t, she _can’t_ …

She wakes, gasping, to a fireball in her hand and Regina standing over her with a frown on her face.

“You really need to control that,” Regina says, and waves a hand to douse the flame.

Zelena doesn’t argue. She sits up, moody and uncomfortable, and shakes out her hand. The heat is still there, itching and cracking under the skin, but at least it’s not painful.

“I’ve been without my magic for too long,” she grumbles.

Regina barks a laugh. “Not long enough, in my book.” Still, for all her posturing, she doesn’t threaten another magic-neutralising cuff; it’s as much of a win as Zelena could hope for right now. “You know we can’t trust you with the baby if you can’t hold your powers in check.”

“I know,” Zelena says. It’s a credit to her growth, such as it is, that she doesn’t argue. “I’m just out of practice, that’s all. Haven’t had to worry about controlling it for a while.”

Regina sighs. For a moment, it looks like she’s going to turn around and leave, storm off to wherever Robin is hiding with the baby and let that be the end of this awkward sisterly moment. She looks sorely tempted, anyway, and the part of Zelena that is still trying to shake off the dream rather wishes that she would. She wants the solitude, wants the freedom to indulge her misery in peace and quiet.

Of course, Regina doesn’t leave. Maybe she senses that Zelena wants her to and chooses to stay out of wilful, sisterly spite, or maybe it’s just another mark of the differences between them, that pesky compassion that the heroes are so fond of. Hell, maybe she just knows better than to leave Zelena alone for too long when she’s in this sort of a mood.

Whatever the reason, she sounds almost sincere when she says, “I can help you with that.”

“Please.” There’s a huff in her voice, just derisive enough to hide the tremor beneath. “Like there’s anything I could learn from you. You’re forgetting which of the two of us is more powerful.”

“Quite the contrary, I assure you.” Regina’s smile is keen and tight, like Zelena always imagined their mother’s would be. “But power isn’t enough. Not if you want a future with your daughter.”

That’s a low blow, and Zelena feels the fire spark to life at her fingertips again. It’s not a loss of control this time; it’s a warning and a threat, and Regina knows it too. “Don’t you _dare_ …”

“Zelena.” She’s sighing again, rolling her eyes like this is such a bloody chore. “For once in your life, look around and see the world for what it is. I’m not your enemy any more. Heaven preserve me, I’m actually trying to help you.”

And just like that Zelena is the one sighing, the one shifting uncomfortably and wishing she could just storm out before things get too messy. She doesn’t want to get into this nonsense, doesn’t want to lay her weaknesses and her fears bare in front of the person she’s dedicated half her life to hating. She doesn’t want Regina to see how much this means to her, how much she’s already changed from just two seconds with her daughter. She doesn’t want Regina to see any part of her at all. Why can’t they still be enemies? Why can’t they die that way? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

She doesn’t storm out, though, no more than Regina did, and she doesn’t turn this into a fight either. She just shuts her eyes and says, “It’s always been difficult.”

“Hm?”

There’s no accusation there, only curiosity, but that doesn’t make it any easier to elucidate.

“Controlling my magic. Controlling myself. Control in general, I suppose.” Memories, dozens of them, catch the light in her mind’s eye, and she struggles to hold them down. It’s harder than it should be, but she does it because the alternative is letting Regina see just how weak-willed she really is. “I’ve always had trouble with it.”

When she opens her eyes again, Regina is smiling. It’s a sad smile, sort of broken, but at least it’s something.

“Mother was like that,” she says. “So much power and so little control.”

Zelena turns the word over her tongue but doesn’t say it out loud. _Mother._ She may not have one, but now she is one.

“You’re a lot like her,” Regina goes on, not waiting for a reply. “The arrogance, the recklessness, the blind ambition. You’d both destroy everything in your path, and never even realise that you destroyed your own happiness in the process.”

There’s truth to that. It’s a bitter thing, unpleasant on the tongue, but Zelena can’t hide from it any more, if she ever really could. She has done terrible things in her life — maybe not ‘Evil Queen’ terrible, but terrible enough in their own right — and she’s no happier for it than she would have been if she’d stayed back at her childhood home, locked up tight and bound to her father’s drinking. So much wickedness and hard work, and all it ever got her was more and more misery. What was the point?

“How is that even possible?” She’s nearly pleading. “You say I’m like her, but how can I be like someone I never knew?”

Regina doesn’t answer. She just says, “It’s not too late for you to change.”

“Someone told me that once,” Zelena says. Her heart aches; she hasn’t thought of Glinda in such a long time. “She was wrong.”

She was wrong about a lot of things, as a matter of fact, but then so was Zelena. Looking for love in people who could take it away, for one thing. Daring to believe in herself, for another. There’s nothing new in the way Regina is looking at her now, the way she’s talking to her; Zelena has heard it all before, and she knows where this road will lead in the end.

How many times has she been here, staring at someone who insists again and again and again that she’s worth saving, that there’s enough left inside her to try? How many times have they realised their stupidity, given up and walked away? Regina is no different from Glinda or Rumpelstiltskin or anyone else who ever placed the wrong kind of faith in someone so wicked.

“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Regina says. “I’m just saying your daughter deserves a better mother than we had.”

Zelena knows that. She’s just not sure how that’s going to happen in a cesspit like Storybrooke. How is she supposed to bond with her daughter when she can’t even fall asleep without her loving sister watching her every move? No matter where she turns, no matter what she does, she’s surrounded by them, heroes and reformed villains who still think she belongs in a cell with a cuff on her wrist to strip her of everything she is. She’ll be the first to admit that she doesn’t deserve another second chance, but how is she supposed to be a good mother is when the whole bloody world is sitting there waiting for her to screw up?

She sighs, shakes her head. Then, without thinking, she blurts out, “Can I hold her again?”

The boldness surprises her, though apparently not Regina. “She’s not a toy, Zelena.”

“I know that.” She’s already bristling, defensive, and it takes a moment or two to rein in her more spiteful impulses. “I just want to say goodbye to her, that’s all.” She makes a show of spreading her arms, playing the perfect martyr. “We both know I’ve outstayed my welcome here, and I don’t think one more minute with my daughter is too much to ask for before I sod off and leave you and Robin to your little love-nest.”

“It’s not…” Regina sighs, then throws up her hands. “Forget it. I’m not playing this game.”

Zelena smirks, feigning innocence. “Is that a ‘yes’, then?”

“Only if you keep your mouth shut,” Regina says, and doesn’t bother to hide her glare.

Zelena shrugs her acquiescence. Well, why not? If that’s the worst compromise she’ll be forced to make through this little arrangement it’ll be a hell of a win.

It breaks her just as thoroughly, holding her daughter a second time. Everything else melts away, Regina and Robin and their ridiculous apartment, everything, until it’s just the two of them, just her and her precious child, the only person in this or any other world who would ever stand a chance of loving her.

Regina leans in suffocatingly close. Zelena thinks she catches the shadow of tears in her eyes, but maybe that’s just the light.

“If you really want her to love you,” she’s saying, and there are tears in her voice as well, “you’ll do whatever it takes to be worthy of it.”

Zelena shakes her head. The odds are stacked against her, they both know that. If Regina and Robin have their way, this child will know her mother’s wickedness before she even knows her name. They’ll tell her the most unspeakable lies and… well, okay, maybe not _lies_ , but still. They’ll poison her, make her into a hero, make her just like them. Zelena can already see those things in her daughter’s bleary eyes: _goodness_ and _innocence_ and everything she herself will never be.

“I can’t,” she says, and for the first time it feels like a failure. “I can’t be what you want me to be. I can’t be good. I can’t.”

“True as that may be…” After so many years, the disappointment, the automatic dismissal doesn’t even hurt any more. Regina sighs, though, like she expects it to, and makes a feint at looking contrite. “Look, Zelena. No-one’s asking you to turn over a new leaf and become a hero overnight. God knows, I don’t expect you’ll ever be a decent person. But if you want your daughter to love you, you have to earn it. And that means being a decent _mother_.”

Zelena closes her eyes. tries to picture her own mother. Not the one she never had, the one who abandoned her and chose Regina, but the one she did have, the one who did love her if only for a few short years. She tries to remember her face, to recall the sound of her voice, her laughter, but it’s so far away, so long ago, so distant… it’s like it never happened. The only thing she can see or hear or feel when she thinks back to her childhood is her father’s voice and her own face in the mirror, reflected in black and blue and green.

“I never had a mother,” she says to Regina. Tears splash her daughter’s forehead, cold and salty; they upset her, make her fuss and whine, and all Zelena can think is that she’s been a mother for less than five minutes and all she’s done thus far is make her child cry. “How am I supposed to be something I’ve never known?”

Regina finds and squeezes her wrist. Her fingers are bony, her grip unintentionally hard. It’s almost like having the cuff back on.

“I think…” Her voice hitches, just a little. She wets her lips and tries again. “I think you know it better than anyone. Certainly better than I did when I got Henry.”

Her grip loosens just a little; Zelena frowns down at the point of contact, marvels at the differences in their skin.

“I doubt that,” she says softly.

“It’s true.” Regina’s voice is strong now, unwavering. “You’ve spent a lifetime, quite literally, wishing that someone, anyone would love you. You know what the absence of love can do to a person. You’ve lived with it your whole life. Do you really expect me to believe that you, of all people, don’t know how to love your child?”

“I…” She swallows hard, suddenly frightened. “But what if it’s not enough?”

Suddenly, Regina’s eyes are very soft. “Would it have been enough for you?” she asks in a whisper.

Zelena doesn’t even need to think about it. The answer has been boiling in her blood since the day she was born. “Yes.”

Regina presses a kiss to the baby’s forehead, and one to her sister’s cheek. “Then trust that it will be enough for her.”

“Will it?” She’s not asking Regina this time; she’s asking the only person in the world who matters. “Will it be enough for you, my little sweet pea?”

There’s no answer, of course, but then Zelena doesn’t really need one. Her daughter’s face is so expressive, her eyes so bright, so big and blue and beautiful; she can see her own face reflected there, and she marvels at how different it looks now. She’s spent so long staring at her reflection in whatever surface she can find, seeking out the flaws and the damage, the glamours that mask her memories, the shades of envy that never really faded, so long seeing only the worst in herself, the malice and the pain and the spite. She’s spent so long studying the green in her skin, she’s never seen it reflected in something so blue.

Zelena doesn’t know if love can redeem her, if anything can. But seeing it now, feeling it touch her for the first time in her life, she realises that it doesn’t matter. Redemption, right and wrong, revenge… none of it means a bloody thing. The only thing that does, the only thing that ever will, is _this_ , her daughter and the love she sees in her eyes.

It is enough.

And now that she has it, she will never, ever let it go.

***


End file.
